Editors’ Introduction

Author(s):  
Axel Schneider ◽  
Daniel Woolf

This concluding volume in The Oxford History of Historical Writing covers a very small period in comparison with some of its companions: barely two‐thirds of a century. As with the other volumes, the boundary dates are both fluid and imprecise: 1945 is a watershed date for the world in the sense that it marked the end of the Second World War and the division of Europe into a Western and an Eastern bloc. Elsewhere in the world, other dates are more meaningful: for China, 1949 is the critical year; and in much of Africa the decolonization of the 1950s and 1960s marked a significant rupture with past, colonial historiography. Unlike the earlier volumes, our period is also an unfinished one, for though some obvious sub‐periods are broken at points such as the early 1960s, the fall of European communism at the end of the 1980s, and the rapid rise of both globalization and radical Islam during the 1990s, it is difficult to predict, in early 2010 as this introduction is written, just where the story of post‐war historiography will end, or how. What ...

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
John Marsland

During the twenty years after the Second World War, housing began to be seen as a basic right among many in the west, and the British welfare state included many policies and provisions to provide decent shelter for its citizens. This article focuses on the period circa 1968–85, because this was a time in England when the lack of affordable, secure-tenured housing reached a crisis level at the same time that central and local governmental housing policies received wider scrutiny for their ineffectiveness. My argument is that despite post-war laws and rhetoric, many Britons lived through a housing disaster and for many the most rational way they could solve their housing needs was to exploit loopholes in the law (as well as to break them out right). While the main focus of the article is on young British squatters, there is scope for transnational comparison. Squatters in other parts of the world looked to their example to address the housing needs in their own countries, especially as privatization of public services spread globally in the 1980s and 1990s. Dutch, Spanish, German and American squatters were involved in a symbiotic exchange of ideas and sometimes people with the British squatters and each other, and practices and rhetoric from one place were quickly adopted or rejected based on the success or failure in each place.


Literary Fact ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 314-332
Author(s):  
Michela Venditti

The article is a introduction to the publication of the minutes of the meetings of the Russian lodge "Northern Star" in Paris, concerning the discussion on the admission of women to freemasonry. The proposed archival materials, deposited in the National Library of France in Paris, date back to 1945 and 1948. The women's issue became more relevant after the Second World War due to the fact that Masonic lodges had to recover and recruit new adherents. The article offers a brief overview of the women's issue in the history of Freemasonry in general, and in the Russian emigrant environment in particular. One of the founders of the North Star lodge, M. Osorgin, spoke out in the 1930s against the admission of women. In the discussions of the 1940s, the Masonic brothers repeat his opinion almost literally. Women's participation in Freemasonry is rejected using either gender or social arguments. Russian Freemasons mostly cite gender reasons: women have no place in Freemasonry because they are not men. Freemasonry, according to Osorgin, is a cult of the male creative principle, which is not peculiar to women. Discussions about the women's issue among Russian emigrant Freemasons are also an important source for studying their literary work; in particular, the post-war literary works of Gaito Gazdanov are closely connected with the Masonic ideology.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 341-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewa Łużyniecka ◽  
Monika Dąbkowska

This article is about conservational and study works on the enclosure of an old cystercian abbey in Krzeszów, that were made after the Second World War. Post-war history of conservation of this monument exhibits two periods. The first one covers 50 post-war years, where only routine maintenance was done. The latter period began at the beginning of the XXI century. Since then fragments of the building were renovated piece by piece. Current cultural and touristic needs were taken into consideration.Revalorization of Krzeszów Abbey in years 2007-2008 and since 2014 revealed the basements and relicts of the groundfloor of the south and west wings of the complex. At the same time the architectural studies were made, resulting in new conclusions of transformations of this building.


Author(s):  
Alexander Sukhodolov ◽  
Tuvd Dorj ◽  
Yuriy Kuzmin ◽  
Mikhail Rachkov

For the first time in Russian historiography, the article draws attention to the connection of the War of Khalkhin Gol in 1939 and the conclusion of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939. For a long time, historical science considered these two major events in the history of the USSR and history of the world individually, without their historic relationship. The authors made an attempt to provide evidence of this relationship, showing the role that surrounding and defeating the Japanese army at Khalkhin Gol in August 1939 and signing in Moscow of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact played in the history of the world. The study analyzes the foreign policy of the USSR in Europe, the reasons for the failure in the conclusion of the Anglo-Franco-Soviet military union in 1939 and the circumstances of the Pact. It shows the interrelation between the defeat of the Japanese troops at Khalkhin Gol and the need for the Soviet-German treaty. The authors describe the historic consequences of the conclusion of the pact for the further development of the Japanese-German relations and the course of the Second World War. They also present the characteristics of the views of these historical events in the Russian historiography.


Colossus ◽  
2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Budiansky

The paths that took men and women from their ordinary lives and deposited them on the doorstep of the odd profession of cryptanalysis were always tortuous, accidental, and unpredictable. The full story of the Colossus, the pioneering electronic device developed by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC & CS) to break German teleprinter ciphers in the Second World War, is fundamentally a story of several of these accidental paths converging at a remarkable moment in the history of electronics—and of the wartime urgency that set these men and women on these odd paths. Were it not for the wartime necessity of codebreaking, and were it not for particular statistical and logical properties of the teleprinter ciphers that were so eminently suited to electronic analysis, the history of computing might have taken a very different course. The fact that Britain’s codebreakers cracked the high-level teleprinter ciphers of the German Army and Luftwaffe high command during the Second World War has been public knowledge since the 1970s. But the recent declassification of new documents about Colossus and the teleprinter ciphers, and the willingness of key participants to discuss their roles more fully, has laid bare as never before the technical challenges they faced—not to mention the intense pressures, the false steps, and the extraordinary risks and leaps of faith along the way. It has also clarified the true role that the Colossus machines played in the advent of the digital age. Though they were neither general-purpose nor stored-program computers themselves, the Colossi sparked the imaginations of many scientists, among them Alan Turing and Max Newman, who would go on to help launch the post-war revolution that ushered in the age of the digital, general-purpose, stored-program electronic computer. Yet the story of Colossus really begins not with electronics at all, but with codebreaking; and to understand how and why the Colossi were developed and to properly place their capabilities in historical context, it is necessary to understand the problem they were built to solve, and the people who were given the job of solving it.


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.


1989 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Brooke

‘Labour Comes of Age’, Kingsley Martin observed a few days after the party's electoral landslide of 1945. This might have been more precise if a chorus had added, sotto voce, ‘…And Comes Into an Inheritance’, for since the publication of Paul Addison's The road to 1945 (1975), the history of the Labour party during and after the war has been dominated by the notion of a political consensus forged during the Churchill coalition and left as a legacy to the Attlee government. According to Addison, it was the consensus of Keynes and Beveridge that shaped post-war politics rather than any distinctive contribution from Labour.


2017 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 141-164
Author(s):  
Maria Juda

POLISH POST-WAR RESEARCH INTO THE HISTORY OF PUBLISHING IN POLAND: ACHIEVEMENTS AND RESEARCH PROPOSALSThe history of publishing in Poland encompasses many issues associated with the emergence and dissemination of printed books. Of fundamental significance to the study of these issues are the records of the publishing output: while we have nearly complete — though requiring further exploration — records of this output for 15th–18th centuries, documented in bibliographies and catalogues, the situation is worse when it comes to the 19th and 20th centuries, until the outbreak of the Second World War. In this respect what we need is not only a continuation, but a radical intensification of bibliographic work. This concerns works published in the Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Greek scripts as well as musical notation. Polish book scholars devoted a lot of attention to the beginnings of printing in Poland; the historiography concerning various typographic workshops located in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is rich, though it still requires further extensive studies. The scholars were also interested in phenomena influencing the content structure of printed publications, like publishing privileges in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, censorship as well as restrictions imposed by the partitioning powers and later by Poland’s communist authorities, as a result of which Polish publications had to be printed abroad and an independent publishing movement emerged. The scholars’ research interests also focused on books as products of the work of printers and publishers, on the publication of written works. They focused both on the various components of the book title page, printer’s signet, stemmata etc. and on its editorial composition as a whole.The scholars’ undoubted achievements in their studies of the history of publishing in Poland are significant, yet in many areas they need to be continued and expanded an important task is an edition of sources for the study of the history of Polish publishing, and concentrated on the phenomena that stem from developmental tendencies in modern book studies.


Author(s):  
David Yee

Housing has been a central feature of Latin America’s dramatic transformation into the most urbanized region of the world. Between 1940 and 1970, the portion of people who lived in urban areas rose from 33 percent to 64 percent; a seismic shift that caused severe housing deficits, overcrowding, and sprawl in Latin America’s major cities. After the Second World War, these urban slums became a symbol of underdevelopment and a target for state-led modernization projects. At a time when Cold War tensions were escalating throughout the world, the region’s housing problems also became more politicized through a network of foreign aid agencies. These overlapping factors illustrate how the history of local housing programs were bound up with broader hemispheric debates over economic development and the role of the nation-state in social affairs. The history of urban housing in 20th-century Latin America can be divided into three distinct periods. The first encompasses the beginning of the 20th century, when issues of housing in the central-city districts were primarily viewed through the lens of public health. Leading scientists, city planners, psychiatrists, and political figures drew strong connections between the sanitary conditions of private domiciles and the social behavior of their residents in public spaces. After the Second World War, urban housing became a proving ground for popular ideas in the social sciences that stressed industrialization and technological modernization as the way forward for the developing world. In this second period, mass housing was defined by a central tension: the promotion of modernist housing complexes versus self-help housing—a process in which residents build their own homes with limited assistance from the state. By the 1970s, the balance had shifted from modernist projects to self-help housing, a development powerfully demonstrated by the 1976 United Nations (UN) Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat I). This seminal UN forum marked a transitional moment when the concepts of self-help community development were formally adopted by emergent, neo-liberal economists and international aid agencies.


2005 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-215
Author(s):  
Denis Moschopoulos

The article reviews the major moments in the history of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences from the year of its establishment (1930) to the present. Additionally, it provides information on the 1910-30 period during which the Permanent Commission for International Congresses in Administrative Sciences operated. More specifically, the article presents the main themes addressed by the international congresses, round tables and conferences organized by the previously mentioned Commission in the beginning, and by the Institute after 1930. Attention is given to the Institutés ‘internationalization’ during the post Second World War period. The Institutés international vocation was demonstrated by the participation of member states and national sections from all over the world, as well as by the development of cooperation with international and supranational organizations. Finally, the Institutés scientific methods and techniques during the 20th century are presented.


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