Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Jacob Darwin Hamblin

The Wretched Atom is the first historical study of efforts to promote nuclear technologies globally from the Second World War to the close of the twentieth century. It focuses on countries that seemed to live at the knife’s edge of human existence—those with subsistence economies or resource shortfalls, or where peoples routinely were threatened by famine, drought, and disease. The promise of civilian atomic energy was a formidable tool of state power in the late twentieth century because it took advantage of social aspirations, anxieties, and environmental vulnerabilities, especially in the developing world. The deployment of rhetoric to promote atomic energy was inseparable from geopolitics writ large and has rarely been entirely peaceful. Instead it has been embedded in stories of conventional warfare, racial and neocolonial divisiveness, struggles to assert control over the earth’s natural resources, and the abetting of nuclear weapons programs both old and new.

2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-23
Author(s):  
Nela Štorková

While today the Ethnographic Museum of the Pilsen Region represents just one of the departments of the Museum of West Bohemia in Pilsen, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in 1915, it emerged as an independent institution devoted to a study of life in the Pilsen region. Ladislav Lábek, the founder and long-time director, bears the greatest credit for this museum. This study presents PhDr. Marie Ulčová, who joined the museum shortly after the Second World War and in 1963 replaced Mr. Lábek on his imaginary throne. The main objective of this article is to introduce the personality of Marie Ulčová and to evaluate the activity of this Pilsen ethnographer and the museum employee with an emphasis on her work in the Ethnographic Museum of the Pilsen Region. The basic aspects of the ethnographic activities, not only of Marie Ulčová but also of the Ethnographic Museum of the Pilsen Region in the years 1963–1988, are described through her professional and popularising articles, archival sources and contemporary periodicals.


2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-61
Author(s):  
Jill Felicity Durey

This article illuminates two short stories by John Galsworthy through examining them with the help of his diaries and letters, a handful of unpublished letters by his nephew from an internment camp and secondary historical sources. It argues that the stories, when read in conjunction with these sources, are highly revealing about human nature during Second World War and also about Galsworthy’s prescient fears concerning a second twentieth-century world war, which he did not live to see.


Author(s):  
Dirk van Keulen

Abstract Arnold Albert van Ruler (1908-1970) was one of the leading theologians in the Dutch Reformed Church in the second half of the twentieth century. After having worked as a minister in Kubaard (1933-1940) and Hilversum (1940-1947) he was professor at the University of Utrecht (1947-1970). Van Ruler had a special place in the Dutch theological landscape. The development of his views took the opposite direction of the mainstream of Dutch protestant theology, which can be illustrated with his reception of the theology of Karl Barth. Before the Second World War Van Ruler was a Barthian theologian; after the War he distanced himself from Barth. As a result of this, some of Van Ruler’s theological views were controversial. Van Ruler himself felt somewhat lonely and complained that he was neglected by his colleagues. On the morning of December 15, 1970, Van Ruler had his third heart attack and dead sitting at his writing desk. In this contribution the reactions on Van Ruler’s death are documented. In many daily newspapers his death is mentioned and in several the significance of his work is described. During the months after his death in many ecclesiastical weekly’s and in theological journals in Memoriams were published. We find personal memories and praise for his style of theologising, which was experienced as sparkling and bright. Van Ruler’s colleagues recognised his originality. His views on theocracy, however, remained as controversial as they were during his lifetime.


Author(s):  
Ana Mª Manzanas Calvo

From Anthony Burgess’s musings during the Second World War to recent scholarly assessments, Gibraltar has been considered a no man’s literary land. However, the Rock has produced a steady body of literature written in English throughout the second half of the twentieth century and into the present. Apparently situated in the midst of two identitary deficits, Gibraltarian literature occupies a narrative space that is neither British nor Spanish but something else. M. G. Sanchez’s novels and memoir situate themselves in this liminal space of multiple cultural traditions and linguistic contami-nation. The writer anatomizes this space crossed and partitioned by multiple and fluid borders and boundaries. What appears as deficient or lacking from the British and the Spanish points of view, the curse of the periphery, the curse of inhabiting a no man’s land, is repossessed in Sanchez’s writing in order to flesh out a border culture with very specific linguistic and cultural traits.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 61 (5) ◽  
pp. 802-804
Author(s):  
Lawrence R. Berger

In 1943, amidst the nation's mobilization for the Second World War, there appeared an article by Dr. William Schmidt of the Children's Bureau on the susceptibility of young people to the hazards of radioactive materials.1 Reviewing the literature, and invoking generally accepted pediatric principles, Dr. Schmidt concluded that young people possess special vulnerability to the hazards of radiation, and that this warranted their exclusion from employment in the gas mantle and radium dial industries. Now, more than 30 years later, there again exists an urgent need to review the topic of radiation and children. With the spread of nuclear weapons technology to many countries, the spectre of nuclear test fallout (not to mention nuclear warfare!) is once again upon us.


Author(s):  
Malcolm Tull

This essay explores the key developments in Australian ports since the end of the Second World War, as technological improvements to trade, shipping, and cargo-handling necessitated port modernisation. Discussing Australian ports collectively, Malcolm Tull examines The growth of port activity; technological change; port and city interactions; and microeconomic reform and the ports, to conclude that Australian ports, despite major renovations in the latter half of the twentieth century, have developed a reputation for efficiency and reliability, and that port management must improve in order for the country to keep up with the demands of a global shipping community.


Author(s):  
Basil Mogridge

This chapter, provided by Basil Mogridge, explores the maritime labour system in twentieth century Britain. It is particularly concerned with the nature of strikes, but also explores wages, manning, crew costs, the supply and demand of maritime labour, and flag discrimination. The British system is compared and contrasted with the Norwegian system due to their historically similar approaches to maritime labour. It concludes that labour relations and labour costs were not a contributing factor to the slow growth of British shipping in the post-Second World War period, despite their negative impact after the First.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth C. Macknight

This chapter examines the interactions between nobles and various public bodies for the preservation of art, archives, and architectural heritage from the 1950s to the 2000s. It documents nobles’ communication with museum curators and archivists about the lending of items for exhibitions and about the donation or deposition of private archives for the State’s collections. Analysis of this correspondence sheds light on evolutions in twentieth-century attitudes toward patrimony, including the reasons that some items have been kept while others have been deliberately destroyed. The chapter shows how efforts to attract tourists to châteaux received increased stimulus and government support after the Second World War. Nobles in the twenty-first century remain closely involved in initiatives for heritage preservation via family networks and civic associations.


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.


Author(s):  
Beryl Pong

At a time when the English landscape was mobilized—both materially and in the cultural imagination—for fighting the Second World War, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot fashioned their most ‘English’ works, Between the Acts (1941) and Four Quartets (1935–42) respectively. Building on extant scholarship surrounding the writers’ temporal and environmental concerns, Chapter 6 provides an alternative account of the writers’ supposed national insularity as one inflected by pacifist and internationalist motivations. Tracing the study of ecology as it was historically intertwined with cosmopolitical inquiry in the twentieth century, the chapter reveals ways in which the writers’ late modernist works uphold Anglocentric exceptionalism but, also, provide diversified understandings of time and place to convey international belonging.


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