Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Sarah Farmer

In post World War II France, the postwar drive to modernize and explosive economic growth caused the collapse of the peasantry as a social class. Peasants left the countryside en masse, villages emptied out, and fields that had been cultivated for centuries were left fallow. And yet, this book argues, rural France did not vanish in the sweeping transformations of the 1950s and 1960s. Paradoxically, postwar modernization made the French yearn for imaginative and tangible connections to the life that peasants had once lived. This, in turn, became an engine of change in its own right. Rural Inventions explores this paradox. Nostalgia for the rural is a thread that runs through the chapters of this study. Yet Rural Inventions also shows that in the postagrarian society initiated by the postwar economic boom, the rural could become a harbinger of future possibilities. Participants in France’s peasant moment of the 1960s to early 1980s reinscribed dwelling in the countryside as an essential component of contemporary modern life.

2021 ◽  
pp. 323-350
Author(s):  
Jon D. Wisman

The United States was an anomaly, beginning without clear class distinctions and with substantial egalitarian sentiment. Inexpensive land meant workers who were not enslaved were relatively free. However, as the frontier closed and industrialization took off after the Civil War, inequality soared and workers increasingly lost control over their workplaces. Worker agitation led to improved living standards, but gains were limited by the persuasiveness of the elite’s ideology. The hardships of the Great Depression, however, significantly delegitimated the elite’s ideology, resulting in substantially decreased inequality between the 1930s and 1970s. Robust economic growth following World War II and workers’ greater political power permitted unparalleled improvements in working-class living standards. By the 1960s, for the first time in history, a generation came of age without fear of dire material privation, generating among many of the young a dramatic change in values and attitudes, privileging social justice and self-realization over material concerns.


Author(s):  
Neilton Clarke

Gutai Art Association [Gutai Bijutsu Kyōkai] [具体美術協会] was an influential post-World War II Japanese avant-garde collective with an outward-looking mindset. Founded in 1954 in Ashiya, near Osaka, by Japanese artist Jirō Yoshihara (1905–1972), it had fifty-nine members over the course of its eighteen-year lifespan. Gutai—meaning ‘‘embodiment’’ and ‘‘concreteness’’—saw its artists engage a plethora of media and presentation contexts, often beyond gallery walls and frequently with more emphasis upon process than on finished product. A unifying factor among its multifarious tendencies was a spirit of adventure, exemplified by Yoshihara’s oft-cited call to ‘‘do what no one has done before.’’ Embracing performance, theatricality, and outdoor manifestations, with a characteristic impromptu modus operandi, Gutai’s experimental tendencies and liberal ideals breathed new life into art and into a society remaking itself following the cataclysm and repressions of World War II. As Japan entered the 1960s, consolidating its economy and engagement with the rest of the world, the decidedly offbeat stance of Gutai’s earlier years assumed a cooler demeanor, due in part to nation-wide technological advancement, growing internationalism, and an evolving audience base and receptivity. The Gutai group disbanded following Yoshihara’s passing in 1972.


Author(s):  
Lyn Ragsdale ◽  
Jerrold G. Rusk

Abstract: The chapter considers nonvoting after World War II, a unique electoral period in American history with the lowest nonvoting rates of any period from 1920–2012. The post-war period also boasts the highest economic growth rate of any of the four periods, coupled with the early days of television which transformed politics in the 1950s. In general, economic growth and the introduction of television move nonvoting rates downward. The chapter also considers in detail the struggles leading to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the law’s impact on nonvoting rates among African Americans. It also uncovers that in the 1960s the Vietnam War increased nonvoting. The chapter begins an analysis of nonvoting at the individual level. The less individuals know about the campaign context and the less they form comparisons between the candidates, the more likely they will say home on Election Day.


1999 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Wright

This address urges Americanists to take the post–World War II era on board as economic history, using the Civil Rights Revolution to set an example. The speed and sweepof the movement's success illustrates the dynamics of an “unanticipated revolution” as analyzed by Timur Kuran, to be grouped with famous historical surprises such as the triumph of British antislavery and the fall of Soviet communism. The evidence confirms that the breakthroughs of the 1960s constituted an economic as well as a political revolution, in many respects an economic revolution for the entire southern region, as well as for African-Americans.


2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fran Markowitz

During the latter part of the twentieth century, there was a country called Yugoslavia. Built on the ruins of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the post-World War II Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia was an ethnically diverse state comprised of six republics, which, by the 1960s, was committed to a foreign policy of non-alignment and to the domestic programs of worker self–management and “brotherhood and unity” among its peoples (see, e.g., Banac 1984; P. Ramet 1985; Shoup 1968; Zimmerman 1987). Like most other European states, the decennial census became a defining feature of Yugoslavia's sovereignty and modernity (Kertzer and Arel 2002: 7).


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frédéric Docquier ◽  
Riccardo Turati ◽  
Jérôme Valette ◽  
Chrysovalantis Vasilakis

Author(s):  
Daniel Thomas Cook

The conclusion connects themes woven through the previous chapters with the approaches and understandings of present-day children’s market researchers in order to argue that the dynamics of the moral project of childhood continue to inform contemporary understandings and approaches to the child. For one, the rise of the “creative child” in the post–World War II era repeats and extends the elements of taste central to nineteenth-century dynamics surrounding the production of the bourgeois child. As well, mothers continue to be implicated in the fabrication of children’s selves and interiorities largely through the work of provisioning of goods in ways that are responsive to children’s presumed and articulated subjectivities. The kind of child crafted out of an admixture of Christian conception, social class practice, and maternal accountability comprises the essential elements of a contemporary dominant, moral ideal. It is an approach that hopefully invites consideration of its ubiquity across domains rather than its exceptionality.


Author(s):  
Daniel DiSalvo

This chapter explores the emergence of political and policy polarization in the post–World War II period. In the early Cold War years, a bipartisan foreign policy was evident in the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations. In domestic policy, Democrats and Republicans argued over the extent of the New Deal welfare and regulatory state, but there was little sentiment for returning to a laissez-faire weak state. Both parties were divided along regional lines, with Democrats composed of northeastern and southern regional factions, while Republicans divided generally along Northeast and Midwest factional lines. The 1960s, however, marked a turning point in general realignment, as Sunbelt states deserted the Democratic Party and turned largely Republican. Voter and party leadership became increasingly polarized beginning in the 1980s and would grow in intensity.


ILR Review ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-203
Author(s):  
David Fairris

Manufacturing injury rates followed a U-shaped pattern over the 1946–70 period, falling for roughly the first fifteen years after World War II and then rising by an almost equal amount in the following decade. Rapid economic growth, changing demographics of the manufacturing labor force, and technological changes in production cannot account for the rising injury rates during the 1960s. Basing his analysis on a variety of sources, the author of this paper argues, instead, that the rise in injury rates reflects institutional changes in the system of shopfloor governance during the late 1950s that reduced the power of workers to influence shopfloor conditions.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document