Henry Krehbiel: German American, Music Critic

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-187
Author(s):  
Joseph Horowitz

The “dean” of New York's music critics a century ago, Henry Krehbiel–born in Ann Arbor to German immigrant parents—was emblematic of a vibrant intellectual community that blended Germanic and American traits. As a dominant propagator of a distinctively wholesome American Wagnerism, he embodied both German Kunst and American meliorism. As a self-made critic, he combined weighty scholarly learning and prose with a nose for news and a popularizing bent. During World War I, the German enemy incited no more patriotic response than his. But Krehbiel was increasingly stranded in postwar America. A bearer of genteel culture, he retained his iron criterion of uplift; no such aesthetic anchor would stabilize art in times to come.

Author(s):  
Adam Paulsen

This article compares representations of war in Walter Flex’ The Wanderer between Two Worlds (1916), Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel (1920), and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). It shows the extent to which these representations are shaped by political and ideological convictions. The difference between the romantic idealism of Flex and Jünger’s “soldierly nationalism”,which he proposed as a model for the time to come, reflects a major shift during World War I itself. By contrast, neither past nor future seem to be of any use in Remarque’s famous antiwar novel, in which the war generation surprisingly is described as having nothing else to live for beyond the present, i.e. beyond war. Finally, the article suggests how these different representations of war each, in their own way, contributed to the aesthetics and ideology of fascism.


2019 ◽  
pp. 97-114
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Magee

Irving Berlin’s all-soldier World War I revue, Yip Yip Yaphank, made a unique impact on Broadway in 1918 and in Berlin’s work for decades to come. The show forged a compelling and comic connection between theatrical conventions and military protocols, using elements from minstrelsy, the Ziegfeld Follies, and Berlin’s distinctive songs. Featuring such Berlin standards as “Sterling Silver Moon” (later revised as “Mandy”) and “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” it was revised for World War II as This Is the Army, and scenes from it reappear, transformed, in Berlin’s films Alexander’s Ragtime Band and White Christmas.


Author(s):  
Patrick Warfield

World War I gave John Philip Sousa, always an astute businessman, several opportunities to reshape his image and rebuild his career. Sousa embraced first neutrality, and then preparedness, notably in championing “Wake Up, America” during his residency at New York’s Hippodrome. When the country entered the war, Sousa was acclaimed for his quintessential patriotism, and he enlisted in the Naval Reserve to train bandsmen at the Great Lakes Training Station. He even changed his appearance, shaving off his celebrated beard; and he joined in anti-German jingoism, writing a wedding march as a substitute for Wagner and Mendelssohn. By war’s end, he had recaptured the public imagination and rebuilt his legend for the years to come.


2018 ◽  
pp. 198-238
Author(s):  
Richard T. Hughes

While the myth of the Innocent Nation weaves a tale that is objectively false with no redemptive qualities, it is one of the strongest of the American myths in terms of its hold over the American people. That myth, like the nation itself, hangs suspended between the golden age of an innocent past (Nature’s Nation) and a golden age of innocence yet to come (Millennial Nation). Suspended in that vacuous state, Americans imagine that history is irrelevant. How could it be otherwise? Nothing destroys a sense of innocence like the terrors of history taken seriously. Anchored by the pillars that stand at the beginning and end of time, the myth of the Innocent Nation flourished during every modern conflict beginning with World War I, but especially when the nation faced enemies like Nazi Germany in World War II or Isis during the War on Terror. The irony was obvious, for even as the nation proclaimed its innocence, black soldiers, for example, returned from World War II only to face brutality and segregation in their own nation. Countless blacks from Muhammed Ali to Toni Morrison to James Baldwin to Ta-Nehisi Coates have protested that irony in the American myth of Innocence.


Author(s):  
Rogério Arthmar ◽  
Michael McLure

This study reflects on Arthur Cecil Pigou’s role in public debate during the initial phase of the First World War over whether Britain should negotiate a peace treaty with Germany. Its main goal is to provide evidence that the “Cambridge Professor” framed his approach to this highly controversial issue from theoretical propositions on trade, industrial peace, and welfare that he had developed in previous works. After reviewing his contributions on these subjects, Pigou’s letter to The Nation in early 1915, suggesting an open move by the Allies towards an honorable peace with Germany, is presented along with his more elaborate thoughts on this same theme put down in a private manuscript. The negative reactions to Pigou’s letter are then scrutinized, particularly the fierce editorial published by The Morning Post. A subsequent version of Pigou’s plea for peace, delivered in his London speech late in 1915, is detailed, listing the essential conditions for a successful conclusion of the conflict. To come full circle, the paper recapitulates Pigou’s postwar considerations on diplomacy, free trade, and colonialism. The concluding remarks bring together the theoretical and applied branches of Pigou’s thoughts on war and peace.


2021 ◽  
pp. 487-526
Author(s):  
Mark Lawrence Schrad

Chapter 17 examines the Anti-Saloon League’s pivot to pressing for the Eighteenth (Prohibition) Amendment. In 1912 former president Theodore Roosevelt ran as a third-party Progressive against his handpicked Republican successor, William Howard Taft, as Taft had undermined Roosevelt’s signature Pure Food and Drug Act, which included purity standards on alcohol. The electoral split gave the presidency to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who was agnostic toward prohibition. World War I and the accompanying “cult of military sobriety” strengthened prohibitionist sentiment, while the election of 1916 secured the legislative supermajorities needed for a prohibition amendment. Once passed in December 1917, the amendment was ratified with unprecedented speed by January 1919, to come into effect one year later. In the meantime, drys pushed for a “wartime prohibition” until demobilization was complete. With prohibition in America secured, activists looked abroad through the World League Against Alcoholism (WLAA) and its chief emissary, Pussyfoot Johnson.


2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 564-599
Author(s):  
John David Smith

This article examines the World War I service of the University of Michigan historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877–1934). Phillips worked first with black recruits as a volunteer officer for the Young Men's Christian Association at Camp Gordon, Georgia, and later as a U.S. Army Military Intelligence officer in Washington, DC. In these years, Phillips ranked as America's foremost authority on the antebellum South generally and of African American slavery in particular. In 1918 he published his landmarkAmerican Negro Slavery. While on leave from Ann Arbor, Phillips taught English and French, planned educational and recreational programs, and supervised the management and construction of buildings at Camp Gordon's segregated facilities. Phillips's daily interactions with black troops in the cantonment reaffirmed—at least as he saw it—his conclusions that North American slavery had been a relatively benign institution, his belief in the virtues of plantation paternalism and in the management of subject peoples by educated whites, and his attitude that contemporary race relations were generally harmonious. Phillips's observations of African American recruits validated his conviction that blacks benefited most from white-run, regimented organizations and strengthened his belief in economic assimilation and social segregation. His military intelligence work confirmed Phillips's overall commitment to conservative change, whether in foreign or race relations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-463
Author(s):  
Ceyda Karamursel

AbstractThis article probes the legal expropriation of dynastic property in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic. Focused on the period from Abdülhamid II's deposal in 1909 to the decade immediately following the abolition of the caliphate in 1924, it takes parliamentary debates as entry points for exploring how this legislative process redefined the sovereign's relationship with property. Although this process was initially limited only to Yıldız Palace, the debates that surrounded it heuristically helped to shape a new understanding of public ownership of property that was put to use in other contexts in the years to come, most notably during and after World War I and the Armenian genocide, before establishing itself as the foundation of a new ownership regime with the republican appropriation and reuse of property two decades later.


2019 ◽  
pp. 127-148
Author(s):  
Michelle Meinhart

Longleat, a stately home in Wiltshire, England, served as a hospital for British and allied troops in World War I. As reported in the Longleat Lyre, music provided entertainment and relief to recovering soldiers and built a community that transcended boundaries of class and culture. Longleat housed no officers, and soldiers from lower ranks intermingled in musical performances with the aristocrats of the Thynne family and with Reverend Cocks, the chaplain, and his wife. Repertoire was transnational, with American music and styles a staple ingredient, but also with the semi-classical music favored by upper social classes. Longleat built community through music within its environs, throughout the region, and in parallel with music produced and experienced by troops in the trenches.


Author(s):  
George W. Breslauer

Communism was the offspring of wars: World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War. Are such wars likely in the coming decades? If not, new communist regimes on the Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist models are unlikely to come to power in the name of Marxism-Leninism. Whether that ideological heritage becomes again a beacon for revolution may depend on whether, in the future, the historical imagination comes to view communism as having been an achievement or a tragedy.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document