The Only Wonderful Things

Author(s):  
Melissa J. Homestead

This book tells for the first time the story of the central relationship of novelist Willa Cather’s life, her nearly forty-year partnership with Edith Lewis. Cather has been described as a distinguished artist who turned her back on the crass commercialism of the early twentieth century and as a deeply private woman who strove to hide her sexuality, and Lewis has often been identified as her secretary. However, Lewis was a successful professional woman who edited popular magazines and wrote advertising copy at a major advertising agency and who, behind the scenes, edited Cather’s fiction. Recognizing Lewis’s role in Cather’s creative process changes how we understand Cather as an artist, while recovering their domestic partnership (which they did not seek to hide) provides a fresh perspective on lesbian life in the early twentieth century. Homestead reconstructs Cather and Lewis’s life together in Greenwich Village and on Park Avenue, their travels to the American Southwest that formed the basis of Cather’s novels The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop, their summers as part of an all-woman resort community on Grand Manan Island, and Lewis’s magazine and advertising work as a context for her editorial collaboration with Cather. Homestead tells a human story of two women who chose to live in partnership and also explains how the Cold War panic over homosexuality caused biographers and critics to make Lewis and her central role in Cather’s life vanish even as she lived on alone for twenty-five years after her partner’s death.

Author(s):  
Inna N. Mamkina ◽  

The article draws attention to the sociocultural aspect of the Siberian Railway Committee's activities in the early twentieth century. Historiographic analysis showed a research interest in the status of the Committee in the context of the organization of management of the Russian Empire's Eastern outskirts. Taking into account the broad powers of the Siberian Railway Committee, the author notes isolated studies of the social aspect in its activities. The aim of this publication is an attempt to create a holistic view of the activities of the Committee for the implementation of social tasks aimed at improving the life of railway employees at the TransBaikal section of the railway in the early twentieth century. The study was conducted on the basis of the documentation of the Siberian Railway Committee. A number of documents are introduced into scholarly discourse for the first time. Based on the structural and functional approach, using a set of historical research methods, it has been revealed that, after the commissioning of the Trans-Baikal section of the Siberian Railway, considerable attention was paid to solve sociocultural problems aimed at improving the life of railway employees. The preparatory commission chaired by A.N. Kulomzina and the Main School Committee implemented social programs. The author has defined the procedure for the formation of the committee, its structure, and principles of its activity. For the first time, personal data of the school committee's members elected on the Trans-Baikal Railway are introduced into scholarly discourse. The information of the committee's activities of the opening and maintenance of primary schools at railway stations has been summarized. The obtained statistics convincingly prove the effectiveness of the committee in the field of school education. The author notes that the Siberian Railway Committee achieved a very successful development of the school network by applying administrative and financial efforts. The author, for the first time, provides data on the organization of libraries and public convocations for the employees on the Trans-Baikal Railway. She draws attention to the organization of medical care for the employees; establishes the organization order and types of medical institutions; generalizes information about the staff of hospitals and obstetric centers, and the number of patients. The author concludes that the Siberian Railway Committee had an organized and balanced approach to solving sociocultural problems that occupied an important place in its activities. The Siberian Railway Committee's social programs in a number of areas were ahead of those of other government departments.


Author(s):  
E.A. Radaeva ◽  

The purpose of this study is to present a model for the development of the expressionist method in the genre of the novel using the example of the evolution of the novelistic work of the Austrian writer of the early twentieth century L. Perutz. The results obtained: the creative method of the Austrian writer is moving from scientific knowledge to mysticism; in the center of all novels created with a large interval, there is always a confused hero, broken by what is happening (in other words, the absurdity of the world), whose state is often conveyed through gestures; the author finally moves away from linear narration to dividing the plot into almost autonomous stories, thematically gravitating more and more to the distant historical past. Scientific novelty: the novels of L. Perutz are for the first time examined in relative detail through the prism of the aesthetics of expressionism.


Author(s):  
Joseph Lawson

This chapter considers the history of alcohol in Nuosu Yi society in relation to the formal codification of a Yi heritage of alcohol-related culture, and the question of alcohol in Yi health. The relationship of newly invented tradition to older practice and thought is often obscure in studies that lack historical perspective. Examining the historical narratives associated with the exposition of a Yi heritage of alcohol, this study reveals that those narratives are woven from a tapestry of threads with histories of their own, and they therefore shape present-day heritage work. After a brief overview of ideas about alcohol in contemporary discourses on Yi heritage, the chapter then analyses historical texts to argue that many of these ideas are remarkably similar to ones that emerged in the context of nineteenth and early twentieth century contact between Yi and Han communities.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 77
Author(s):  
Nazmul Haque ◽  
Fahmida Pervin

This paper’s overriding concern is to analyze the moral degradation, spiritual sterility, fragmentation, damaged psyche of humanity, the disillusionment of early twentieth-century post-war modern Europe and of course the path of salvation that are enormously manifest in the Thomas Stearns Eliot’s poem ‘The Waste Land’. In the question of regeneration or salvation, Eliot in this poem instructs the morally and spiritually sterile modern man to follow the Indian philosophy, Vedas and Upanishads, the storehouse of knowledge, relief, and source of spiritualism, redemption and salvation. And also he concludes the poem with the sense that if they practise them in their life as instructed, there will be nothing but Shantih, shantih, shantih (peace and tranquility) in their life. This paper thus attempts to dissect how the poem develops exerting the acute sense of spiritual infertility, moral degradation, sexual perversion, meaninglessness in the human relationship of the post-war-devastated and dysfunctional world and concludes with the instruction of the path of salvation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-353
Author(s):  
Malin Nilsson

This article investigates the relationship between labor force transitions and becoming a mother in the early twentieth century. It aims to answer the question: did women start industrial homework when they had their first child? The empirical material consists of 588 interviews made with individual industrial homeworkers in 1911. Event history models were used to analyze the data. The study found that many of the industrial homeworkers did start around the time they had their first child. The results thus suggest that in the early twentieth century, having a child did not always imply making a labor force transition out of the labor force but could also imply making a labor force transition to flexible types of employment, just as it often does today.


Author(s):  
Katherine M. Marino

The Epilogue demonstrates how the UN Charter’s women’s and human rights promises inspired feminists throughout the Americas, and how the Cold War stifled the movement and largely erased the historical memory of inter-American feminism. Paulina Luisi and Marta Vergara helped organize an inter-American feminist meeting in Guatemala in 1947 that articulated broad meanings of inter-American feminism and global women’s and human rights. However, the Cold War’s pitched battle between communism and capitalism narrowed both “feminism” and “human rights” to mean individual political and civil rights. The Cold War also contributed to historical amnesia about this movement. The epilogue explores how Cold War politics affected each of the six feminists in the book. Each woman sought in different ways to archive the movement and write inter-American feminism into the historical record. The epilogue also provides connections between their movement and the global feminist and human rights movements that emerged in the 1970s through the 90s. It argues that the idea that “women’s rights as human rights” was not invented in the 1990s; rather, it drew on the legacy of early twentieth-century inter-American feminism.


Author(s):  
Michiko Suzuki

This chapter examines theories of male–female difference and female identity in Japan by focusing on the intersection of sexology and feminism in the country during the early twentieth century. In particular, it shows how sexologist Ogura Seizaburō and feminist Hiratsuka Raichō drew upon European conceptions of sexual difference, especially those developed by Havelock Ellis, to proffer new ideas about female characteristics and sexuality. The chapter also offers a fresh perspective on Ogura's contribution to the development of early feminism in Japan and considers how he and Hiratsuka strategically used sexology for their own purposes. It argues that while theories of sexual difference have more often supported a maternalist ideology, their use also served other purposes, such as the prioritizing of sex over racial difference.


Author(s):  
Helena Chance

An analysis of the extensive collections of photographs, illustrations, films and ephemera in company archives provides a fresh perspective on the factory gardens and parks. By means of illustrated lectures, publications and factory tours, in which the landscapes featured prominently, industrialists presented their enterprises as places of status, community, opportunity, health and hygiene and their products as authentic and modern. The landscapes and their representations defined this utopianist portrayal of working conditions and labour, and motivated myths about the commodities they produced. The advertising and packaging images from the early twentieth century of the companies discussed here are now iconic in the history of marketing and advertising, for it was largely through effective publicity that they became household names.


Author(s):  
William Klinger ◽  
Denis Kuljis

This groundbreaking biography of Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia presents many startling new revelations, among them his role as an international revolutionary leader and his relationship with Winston Churchill. It highlights his early years as a Comintern operative, the context for his later politics as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The authors argue that in the 1940s, between the dissolution of the Comintern and the rise of NAM, Tito's influence and ambition were far wider than has been understood, extending to Italy, France, Greece and Spain via the international communist networks established during the Spanish Civil War. The book discloses for the first time the connection between Tito's expulsion from the Cominform and the Rome assassination attempt on the Italian Communist Party leader, Palmiro Togliatti — the man who had plotted to overthrow Tito. The book offers a pivotal contribution to our understanding of Tito as a figure of real, rather than imagined, global significance. The book will reward those who are interested in the history of international Communism, the Cold War and the Non-Aligned Movement, or in Tito the man — one of the most significant leaders of the twentieth century.


Kavkazologiya ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 181-193
Author(s):  
T.Sh. BITTIROVA ◽  

This article aims to determine the place of the topic of social justice in the work of the classic of Karachai-Balkarian literature Kyazim Mechiev and the forms of its artistic embodiment. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time the poet's social lyrics are viewed in a broad historical context, in relation to the chronotope. The results obtained showed the scale of the poet's thinking, his sensitivity to historical and political transformations in the life of highland society. The work establishes how the events of the early twentieth century are refracted through the author's worldview and what place the theme of social protest occupies in the poetic heritage of the classic of Karachai-Balkarian literature K.B. Mechiev. Analyzed the poems of K. Mechiev, dedicated to the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary events, the civil war, their accordance to historical realities. The article reveals the depth and scale of reflection of the challenges of the time in the poet's work, his pain, despair and hope.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document