Pick a Pocket Or Two

Author(s):  
Ethan Mordden

This book tells the full history of the British musical, from The Beggar's Opera (1728) to the present, by isolating the unique qualities of the form and its influence on the American model. To place a very broad generalization, the American musical is regarded as largely about ambition fulfilled, whereas the British musical is about social order. Oklahoma!'s Curly wins the heart of the farmer Laurey—or, in other words, the cowboy becomes a landowner, establishing a truce between the freelancers on horseback and the ruling class. Half a Sixpence, on the other hand, finds a working-class boy coming into a fortune and losing it to fancy Dans, whereupon he is reunited with his working-class sweetheart, his modest place in the social order affirmed. Anecdotal and evincing a strong point of view, the book covers not only the shows and their authors but the personalities as well—W. S. Gilbert trying out his stagings on a toy theatre, Ivor Novello going to jail for abusing wartime gas rationing during World War II, fabled producer C. B. Cochran coming to a most shocking demise for a man whose very name meant “classy, carefree entertainment.”

2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Александр Лившин ◽  
Игорь Орлов

Alexander Livshin and Igor Orlov The Soviet “Propaganda State” during World War II: Resource Constraints and Communication Capabilities “The new history of propaganda” studies the historical experience of using propaganda by different countries, including democratic ones, in the time of wars and other crises. It is evident that particular attention is paid to Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR, the two excessively ideology-driven and politicized societies where propaganda played the role far beyond the boundaries of simple ideological indoctrination and manipulation of the public opinions and attitudes with the purpose of pushing the people towards a desired model of behavior. In both states propaganda became a fundamental core institution aimed at building and sustaining the social order. At the same time, if we consider the experience of Stalin’s USSR, then the usage of the term “propaganda state” introduced by Peter Kenez requires a significant caveat.


Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-89
Author(s):  
David Shneer

I began studying Soviet photography in the early 2000s. To be more specific, I began studying Soviet photographers, most of whom had “Jewish” written on their internal passports, as I sought to understand how it was possible that a large number of photographers creating images of World War II were members of an ethnic group that was soon to be persecuted by the highest levels of the state. I ended up uncovering the social history of Soviet Jews and their relationship to photography, as I also explored how their training in the 1920s and 1930s shaped the photographs they took during World War II.


Mahjong ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Annelise Heinz

The Introduction provides an orientation to the book and its key questions: What did it mean to become “modern” in the early twentieth century? How did American ethnicities take shape in the years leading up to and after World War II? How did middle-class women experience and shape their changing roles in society, before the social revolutions of the late twentieth century? How are these things related? The Introduction also covers an overview of mahjong’s trajectory in the United States. It examines background related to the history of leisure, gender, and consumerism in addition to introducing key sources and methodologies. The introduction sets up the book to tell the story of mahjong’s role in the creation of identifiably ethnic communities, women’s access to respectable leisure, and how Americans used ideas of China to understand themselves.


1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick L. Mckitrick

On 10 July 1950, at the celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Wiesbaden Chamber of Artisans (Handwerkskammer), its president Karl Schöppler announced: ‘Today industry is in no way the enemy of Handwerk. Handwerk is not the enemy of industry.…’ These words, which accurately reflected the predominant point of view of the post-war chamber membership, and certainly of its politically influential leadership, marked a new era in the social, economic and political history of German artisans and, it is not too much to say, in the history of class relations in (West) Germany in general. Schöppler's immediate frame of reference was the long-standing and extremely consequential antipathy on the part of artisans towards industrial capitalism, an antipathy of which his listeners were well aware.


Author(s):  
Margaret L. King

Scholars largely neglected the history of the family until after World War II, when they began to employ theoretical perspectives imported from the social sciences. In the 1960s, two principal figures triggered its study: Philippe Ariès, associated with the French Annales school, and Peter Laslett, cofounder at Cambridge University, England, of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Since that period, studies have proliferated on the history of family and household in Europe and its subregions and on the related topics of childhood and youth.


1967 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfonso Gonzalez

The stability of Latin America rests essentially on the solution of two interrelated problems—population growth and economic development. A further corollary, and an extremely significant one, will be the social distribution of the benefits accruing from economic betterment. Latin America is both the fastest growing world region in population and also the most advanced (in terms of the death rate, literacy, and per capita income) of the underdeveloped regions of the world. It is also the only region of the underdeveloped world that had evolved from political colonial status prior to World War II. This region, therefore, has had the longest history of endeavoring to solve directly many of the problems that plague the 70 per cent of mankind that lives in the underdeveloped countries.


Author(s):  
Rosario Forlenza

This book links the emergence of democracy in Italy after World War II to human experiences and the symbolic formation of meaning in a time of political and existential uncertainty. Between 1943 and 1948 Italians experienced the most intense period of the war, with its hardship and violence, and the most intense period of social, economic, and political reconstruction, with its hopes and vitality. Unlike conventional accounts that focus on institutions, ideologies, and political norms, On the Edge of Democracy examines the aspirations, expectations, and hopes of real people in real time—the social dramas the individuals engaged with. Adopting an anthropological approach, it sees the process of democratization in Italy as analogous to a ritual passage, in which social order was suspended and then reasserted following a liminal time during which ideas and beliefs were reformulated and new meanings, symbols, and identities emerged. The period of civil war 1943–5, especially, was a time of brutality and dramatic violence as well as a critical juncture of creative existential pluralism. The events during the period following the collapse of Fascism and the disintegration of national unity created a new popular consciousness and changed the relationships among individuals, and between individual and political power. Existential crisis and lived experiences during this period of uncertainty generated new meanings, interpretations, and hopes that shaped post-Fascist democracy. Democracy in Italy was the consequence of ordinary’s people reactions to, and symbolization of, the circumstances which they went through in those extraordinary times.


Author(s):  
Antonio Andreoni ◽  
William Lazonick

This chapter integrates the theory and history of localized economic development by summarizing the experiences of three iconic industrial districts: a) the Lancashire cotton textile district which in the last half of the nineteenth century enabled Britain to become the ‘workshop of the world’; b) the globally competitive towns and cities specializing in a variety of light industries, especially in the Emilia Romagna regional district, that, as the ‘Third Italy’, brought economic modernity to that nation in the decades after World War II; and 3) the area in California south of San Francisco, centred on Stanford University, that, as ‘Silicon Valley’, made the United States the world leader in the microelectronics and Internet revolutions of the last decades of the twentieth century. Using the ‘social conditions of innovative enterprise’ as a common conceptual approach, the chapter highlights key lessons from history of the nexus between firms and their local ecosystems.


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