Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Erika Hanna
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Irish People

The introduction sets up the story which will be told in the following five substantive chapters. It provides an introduction to the history of Irish photography in the twentieth century and explores how it has been understood by historians. It then goes on to lay out the argument which will be developed throughout the rest of the book. That is, over the course of the twentieth century, photography allowed ordinary Irish people to create spaces of self-expression and contest authority in ways which would have a fundamental impact on the nature of Irish society, and that reading photographic sources can provide us with a new way in to stories of social and cultural change from the perspectives of those on the margins of power.

Ready, Willing, and Able to Divorce: An Economic and Cultural History of Divorce in Twentieth-Century Sweden

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Per Simonsson ◽  
Glenn Sandström
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Marked Decrease ◽  
Marital Dissolution ◽  
Divorce Rate ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Empirical Analysis

This study outlines a long history of divorce in Sweden, recognizing the importance of considering both economic and cultural factors in the analysis of marital dissolution. Following Ansley Coale, the authors examine how a framework of multiple theoretical constructs, in interaction, can be applied to the development toward mass divorce. Applying a long historical perspective, the authors argue that an analysis of gendered aspects of the interaction between culture and economics is crucial for the understanding of the rise of mass divorce. The empirical analysis finds support for a marked decrease in legal and cultural obstacles to divorce already during the first decades of the twentieth century. However, economic structures remained a severe obstacle that prohibited significant increases in divorce rate prior to World War II. It was only during the 1940s and 1960s, when cultural change was complemented by marked decreases in economic interdependence between spouses, that the divorce rate exhibited significant increases. The authors find that there are advantages to looking at the development of divorce as a history in which multiple empirical factors are examined in conjunction, recognizing that these factors played different roles during different time periods.

Power and Place

2020 ◽  
pp. 186-233
Author(s):  
Erika Hanna
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Documentary Photography ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Societal Problems ◽  
New Generation ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

Chapter 6 surveys the history of documentary photography in twentieth-century Ireland. In particular, it examines the emergence of a new generation of documentary photographers and their role in debates about the nature of Irish society from the 1970s to the 1990s. Self-consciously radical, these photographers aimed to use their work to expose injustice and ‘reveal’ the hidden side of Irish life. In particular, the chapter focuses on the career of three photographers: Derek Speirs, Joanne O’Brien, and Frankie Quinn. It uses close readings of the work of these photographers, contemporaneous photography magazines, coupled with the extensive use of oral histories to explore the impact of documentary photography on Ireland in the later twentieth century. In their depiction of poverty as both visceral and uncomfortable, they challenged the traditional iconography of Ireland which had aestheticized or even eulogized these themes. Moreover, these photographers were often self-conscious and reflective regarding the relationship between themselves and the people—often in difficult circumstances—whom they portrayed. Nevertheless, they were often forced to make difficult choices about the depiction of poverty, violence, and injustice which attempted to expose societal problems without being voyeuristic. An exploration of choices they made regarding how they engaged with their subjects, what they photographed, and where they published provides a way of exploring the visual economies of social justice in later twentieth-century Ireland.

Jewish Orthodoxy in Scotland

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Holtschneider
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Cultural Conflicts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Life Journey ◽  
To Come ◽  
Religious Aspects

This book analyses the religious aspects of Jewish acculturation to Scotland through a transnational perspective on migration, focused through an examination of Jewish religious leadership and authority in the international context of Anglophone Jewish history in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on British Jewish history in the first half of the twentieth century, and on the biography of one significant actor in a so-called ‘provincial’ Jewish community, this monograph explores the development of a central feature of British Jewish religious history: power relations within Jewish religious institutions, and particularly relations between the assumed centre (London) and the ‘provinces’ at a time of massive demographic and cultural change. With immigration stagnating and immigrants now poised to stay rather than seeing Britain as a staging post in their journey west, Jewish communities had to come to terms with the majority of their congregants being first generation immigrants, and to deal with the resulting cultural conflicts amongst the migrants and with those resident Jews whose families had acculturated and anglicised one or more generations previously. Salis Daiches’s life journey (1880-1945) highlights central aspects of the processes of adjustment in communities across the United Kingdom from the perspective of the ‘provincial periphery’. Competing religious ideologies in the early twentieth century are a crucial element in the history of British Jewry, rather than a transient social phenomenon. Religion as performed, taught, and thought about at a local level by ‘religious professionals’ is a vehicle for the exploration of the migration.

Bastardy and the Great Famine: Ireland, 1845–1850

1999 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
LIAM KENNEDY
Keyword(s):  
Population Policy ◽  
Western World ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Age At Marriage ◽  
Illegitimate Child ◽  
History Of ◽  
Irish People ◽  
Rising Incidence

‘A woman who has had an illegitimate child is looked on with contempt, and would not be associated with. But the young women have a great deal of discretion, and few of them go astray in that way.’Parish of St. Mary's, Cork, 1835While the claim may seem surprising, Irish society enjoys no mean place in the history of sexuality. Malthus may be said to have re-focused attention on the folly of giving free rein to the passion between the sexes, and some historians, as well as contemporary commentators, viewed the state of pre-Famine Ireland as a confirmation of the dangers of runaway population growth. Post-Famine Irish society, by contrast, gave the appearance of being fashioned according to the principles of Malthusian population policy: an older age at marriage for men and women, a rising incidence of permanent celibacy and a relative absence of ‘vice’. Indeed, long before the end of the Victorian era Irish people were renowned for their prudential approach to matters sexual. This extended to sex outside marriage. Irish illegitimacy rates were amongst the lowest in the Western world. Ideologues protested the virtue and purity of Irish women, and of the Irish race more generally.

Historical Descriptions and Prescriptions for Adolescence

1992 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 341-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara A. Hanawalt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Life Stage ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Female Adolescence ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Definition Of

The use of the term “adolescence” for any period other than the late nineteenth or twentieth century has been much debated. Aries denied that the medieval period had a life phase that could be described with such a term; others have argued that the term carries a particular, very modern meaning even if Augustine did use the term adolescentia. This introduction to a collection of essays on the history of adolescence shows that the life stage was a well recognized and defined one through the Middle Ages and into the modern period. While the modern period did not invent adolescence, it did modify the definition. Constants in acolescence from the thirteenth through the twentieth century are the struggle between adults and youth over entry and exit from adolescence and for control during that period. But much changes over the centuries. Social scientific discussions that aid in our historical analysis are almost entirely based on the male rather than the female experience. While cultural change modifies the male definitions of adolescence, the medieval and twentieth-century definition of female adolescence stays closer to biological than social definitions of puberty.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

Review: Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en LA by Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.)

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crime Wave ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The City ◽  
History Of Los Angeles

Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a “zoot” (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American “gangsters” of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What's more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general.

Queering Musical Biography in the Writings of Edward Prime-Stevenson and Rosa Newmarch

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-118
Author(s):  
Kristin M. Franseen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Benjamin Britten ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Symphonic Music ◽  
Biographical Knowledge

Beginning with the “open secret” of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears's relationship and continuing through debates over Handel's and Schubert's sexuality and analyses of Ethel Smyth's memoirs, biography has played a central role in the development of queer musicology. At the same time, life-writing's focus on extramusical details and engagement with difficult-to-substantiate anecdotes and rumors often seem suspect to scholars. In the case of early-twentieth-century music research, however, these very gaps and ambiguities paradoxically offered some authors and readers at the time rare spaces for approaching questions of sexuality in music. Issues of subjectivity in instrumental music aligned well with rumors about autobiographical confession within Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique) for those who knew how to listen and read between the lines. This article considers the different ways in which the framing of biographical anecdotes and gossip in scholarship by music critic-turned-amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson and Tchaikovsky scholar Rosa Newmarch allowed for queer readings of symphonic music. It evaluates Prime-Stevenson's discussions of musical biography and interpretation in The Intersexes (1908/9) and Newmarch's Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (1900), translation of Modest Tchaikovsky's biography, and article on the composer in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians to explore how they addressed potentially taboo topics, engaged with formal and informal sources of biographical knowledge (including one another's work), and found their scholarly voices in the absence of academic frameworks for addressing gender and sexuality. While their overt goals were quite different—Newmarch sought to dismiss “sensationalist” rumors about Tchaikovsky's death for a broad readership, while Prime-Stevenson used queer musical gossip as a primary source in his self-published history of homosexuality—both grappled with questions of what can and cannot be read into a composer's life and works and how to relate to possible queer meanings in symphonic music. The very aspects of biography that place it in a precarious position as scholarship ultimately reveal a great deal about the history of musicology and those who write it.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document