Lice in War and Peace

2021 ◽  
pp. 125-140
Author(s):  
Robert N. Wiedenmann ◽  
J. Ray Fisher

This chapter considers human lice, which have been parasites of humans throughout all human history and transmit a deadly bacteria that has killed millions. Analyzing lice genetics tells of divergence of humans from other apes and when humans began to wear clothing. Human body lice live in clothing and infest people only to feed. Lice spread easily among people in crowded situations and transmit bacteria causing diseases, such as typhus. The chapter relates how lice-transmitted typhus caused jail fever in early England, resulting in the deaths of more prisoners than the death penalty. Lice and typhus worsened the Irish Great Famine, as the disease killed thousands of Irish emigrating to the United States on “coffin ships.” Epidemics of typhus were prevalent in wartime, killing troops in both World War I and World War II as well as civilians in Nazi concentration camps and the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II and immediately after. Post-war use of DDT averted typhus epidemics in Europe and Japan.

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pál Péter Tóth

A direct consequence of World War I was the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the establishment of new states in its place. This has had far-reaching consequences for both regional and world politics. The existing balance of power as well as social, economic and political problems within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, including the nationality conflicts, led to this result. In spite of the unavoidable collapse, the successors, the new states, were not the result of a natural evolution, but were the creations of the major powers—France, Great Britain, the United States and Italy—who through the creation of their new post-war order ignored the long-term interests of the region and the actual ethnic composition of the land.


2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Setran

AbstractIn the years between World War I and World War II in the United States, public and religious educators engaged in an extended struggle to define the appropriate nature of character education for American youth. Within a post-war culture agonizing over the sanctions of moral living in the wake of mass violence and vanishing certitudes, a group of conservative educators sought to shore up traditional values through the construction of morality codes defining the characteristics of the “good American.” At the same time, a group of liberal progressive educators set forth a vigorous critique of these popular character education programs. This article analyzes the nature of this liberal critique by looking at one leading liberal spokesperson, George Albert Coe. Coe taught at Union Theological Seminary and Teachers College, Columbia University, and used his platform in these institutions to forge a model of character education derived from the combined influences of liberal Protestantism and Deweyan progressive education. Coe posited a two-pronged vision for American moral education rooted in the need for both procedural democracy (collaborative moral decision making) and a democratic social order. Utilizing this vision of the “democracy of God,” Coe demonstrated the inadequacies of code-based models, pointing in particular to the anachronism of traditional virtues in a world of social interdependence, the misguided individualism of the virtues, and the indoctrinatory nature of conservative programs. He proposed that youth be allowed to participate in moral experimentation, adopting ideals through scientific testing rather than unthinking allegiance to authoritative commands. Expanding the meaning of morality to include social as well as personal righteousness, he also made character education a vehicle of social justice. In the end, I contend that Coe's democratic model of character education, because of its scientific epistemological hegemony and devaluing of tradition, actually failed to promote a truly democratic character.


Author(s):  
Julie Hubbert

Much has been said about the Nazi appropriation of Wagner’s music in the 1930s and 1940s. As early as 1933, Hitler transformed the Bayreuth Festival into a celebration of National Socialist ideology and propagated miniature Wagner festivals to celebrate his own birthday. Wagner’s music also resounded throughout the culture and media at large. What has been less understood and examined, however, is how this same music was also used in nonnarrative films, newsreels, government documentaries, and industrial and advertising films of the period. Here the appropriation of Wagner is more complex and problematic. Master Hands (1936), the critically acclaimed, feature-length industrial film sponsored by the American car company Chevrolet, is an excellent example. As several film scholars have observed, the film is an artistic advertisement for the American automobile industry that borrows heavily from Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. But the film’s score, a compilation full of Wagner excerpts, arranged by composer Samuel Benavie and performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, about which almost nothing has been said, is equally propagandistic. By examining the music for this industrial advertisement for Chevrolet, this chapter not only re-examines the reception of Wagner in the United States between the World War I and World War II but also examines the integral role his music played in the creation of American films of persuasion. It explores the use U.S. industrial filmmakers made of Wagner’s music as an audible signifier not for German fascism but to advertise for American democracy, industry, and capitalism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 324
Author(s):  
Zheming Zhang

<p>With the continuous development and evolution of the United States, especially the economic center shift after World War II, the United States become the economic hegemon instead of the UK and thus it seized the economic initiative of the world. After the World War I, the European countries gradually withdraw from the gold standard. In order to stabilize the world economy development and the international economic order, the United States prepared to build the economic system related with its own interests so as to force the UK to return to the gold standard. The game between the United States and the UK shows the significance of economic initiative. Among them, the outcome of the two countries in the fight of the financial system also demonstrates a significant change in the world economic system.</p>


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (47) ◽  
pp. 39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karoline Kühl

The conditions for the Danish language among Danish emigrants and their descendants in the United States in the first half of the 20th century were tough: The group of Danish speakers was relatively small, the Danes did not settle together as other immigrant groups did, and demographic circumstances led many young, unmarried Danish men to marry non-Danish speaking partners. These were all factors that prevented the formation of tight-knit Danish-speaking communities. Furthermore, US nationalistic propaganda in the wake of World War I and the melting-pot effect of post-war American society in the 1950s contributed to a rapid decline in the use of Danish among the emigrants. Analyses of recordings of 58 Danish-American speakers from the 1970s show, however, that the language did not decline in an unsystematic process of language loss, only to be replaced quickly and effectively by English. On the contrary, the recordings show contactinduced linguistic innovations in the Danish of the interviewees, which involve the creation of specific lexical and syntactical American Danish features that systematically differ from Continental Danish. The article describes and discusses these features, and gives a thorough account of the socioeconomic and linguistic conditions for this speaker group.


Author(s):  
JA Frowein

Constitutional law and international law operate in simultaneous conjunction and reciprocal tension. Both fields seem to have overcome the great challenges of destruction and neglect in the course of the 20th century. Both after World War I and World War II the world experienced new waves of constitution making. In both cases the current German constitutions (the Weimar Constitution of 1919 and the Grundgesetz of 1949) were influential. Characteristic of constitution-making in this century, is the final victory of liberal constitutions based on the rule of law, the Rechtsstaat, fundamental rights, meaningful control of public powers and the establishment of constitutional courts. Following the destruction of World War II, the notion of the Sozialstaat emerged strongly in Germany. In contrast to the Constitution of the United States of America, the principle of the responsibility of the state for social justice has emerged in almost all new constitutions, including Russia, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Italy and Portugal. Where courts are given the mandate to interpret bills of rights, fundamental rights have been developed into foundation stones of the legal system. The presence in a Bill of Rights of restrictive clauses, is important for its analysis. Generally restrictive clauses in new constitutions try to limit the possibilities of restriction. The importance of constitutional rules establishing and legitimizing the political organs, must not be overlooked. Of particular importance is the degree of control over the head of state, a positive attitude among political actors towards the constitution and the protection of the interests of minorities in a democratic system. In the field of Public International Law much of Kant's ideal of an international confederation of peace has been realized. Since 1990 the United Nation's Security Council has shown the potential of becoming a directorate for the community ofnations. International law has also been instrumental in the worldwide recognition of human rights. Especially in Europe, Convention Law has had a strong impact. Furthermore, global and regional systems of regulation have tended to alter the legal attitude towards state sovereignty. It may be that the South African constitutional approach in terms of which international law is subject to constitutional and other national law, is not in line with international tendencies.


Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith ◽  
James K. Galbraith

This chapter examines the lessons of World War II with respect to money and monetary policy. World War I exposed the fragility of the monetary structure that had gold as its foundation, the great boom of the 1920s showed how futile monetary policy was as an instrument of restraint, and the Great Depression highlighted the ineffectuality of monetary policy for rescuing the country from a slump—for breaking out of the underemployment equilibrium once this had been fully and firmly established. On the part of John Maynard Keynes, the lesson was that only fiscal policy ensured not just that money was available to be borrowed but that it would be borrowed and would be spent. The chapter considers the experiences of Britain, Germany, and the United States with a lesson of World War II: that general measures for restraining demand do not prevent inflation in an economy that is operating at or near capacity.


Author(s):  
Martin Crotty ◽  
Neil J. Diamant ◽  
Mark Edele

This chapter investigates the cases of victory and defeat and explains what politically influential veterans were able to produce to secure benefits and rights. It focuses on China after its long period of war and civil war that ended in 1949, the United Kingdom after both world wars, the United States after World War I, and the USSR after World War II. It analyses the cases wherein veterans had little or limited success in securing meaningful social and political status. The chapter identifies factors that determine the veterans' status, where it is victory or defeat, or authoritarian versus democratic systems of government. It discusses the political process and the attempts to convert claims into entitlements in order to explain the negative outcomes for the veterans of victorious armies.


Artful Noise ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 42-63
Author(s):  
Thomas Siwe

Modern dance and music for percussion are linked through the works of musicians who studied with the iconoclastic composer Henry Cowell. This chapter highlights the work of numerous artists who were involved in the dance and music scene along the West Coast of the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. Cowell’s early publishing venture New Music helped launch the careers of composers Johanna Beyer, William Russell, Lou Harrison, John Cage, and others. The latter two composers, Harrison and Cage, also studied with the Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg whose use of the twelve-tone technique became central to the music of the twentieth century. The chapter ends with a summary of percussion music’s development from the decades before World War I to the compositional hiatus caused by World War II.


2019 ◽  
pp. 119-134
Author(s):  
Anand Toprani

This chapter provides critical assessment of Britain’s post-World War I oil strategy and details the strategic consequences of its failure during the early years of World War II. It reveals the irreconcilable dilemma that doomed Britain’s attempts to satisfy its energy needs independently in wartime: a shortage of tankers and foreign exchange. Reducing the foreign exchange burden meant increasing imports from the Middle East, which stretched Britain’s supply of tankers to the breaking point, since there were not enough to redirect imports around the Cape of Good Hope after Italian hostility threatened access through the Mediterranean. Drawing oil from the Western Hemisphere required fewer tankers but also cost foreign exchange. Ultimately, Britain’s survival after 1940—as after 1917—depended upon the assistance of the United States.


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