Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Lekan

This chapter introduces readers to Bernhard Grzimek, the “animal whisperer” who created Germany’s longest-running television program (A Place for Animals, 1956–1987), won an Academy Award for his documentary film Serengeti Shall Not Die, and sensitized a generation of young people to the power of ecological lobbying. Having rebuilt the Frankfurt Zoo and saving its remaining animals from the rubble of World War II, Grzimek transferred the idea of a permanent sanctuary for animals and from human violence to the Serengeti, the site of the earth’s last great animal migrations. It then examines the core chapters’ theme: the mismatch between this conservation quest and land rights struggles during the independence era. Grzimek raised funds, brokered diplomatic favors, and promised thousands of animal-loving tourists to save this “gigantic zoo” from human encroachment. A grand mission to be sure—but one that feared Africans’ own ideas about wildlife control and sidestepped their aspirations for environmental sovereignty.

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 251-261
Author(s):  
Shaul Katzir

Historians, philosophers, and physicists portray the 1920s and 1930s as a period of major theoretical breakthrough in physics, quantum mechanics, which led to the expansion of physics into the core of the atom and the growth and strengthening of the discipline. These important developments in scientific inquiry into the micro-world and light have turned historical attention away from other significant historical processes and from other equally important causes for the expansion of physics. World War II, on the other hand, is often seen as the watershed moment when physics achieved new levels of social and technical engagement at a truly industrial scale. Historians have shown that military interests and government funding have shaped physics to unprecedented degree, and according to some, to the extent of discontinuity with earlier practices of research (Forman 1987; Kevles 1990; Kaiser 2002). In this vein, Stuart Leslie wrote, “Nothing in the prewar experience fully prepared academic scientists and their institutions for the scale and scope of a wartime mobilization that would transform the university, industry, and the federal government and their mutual interrelationships” (Leslie 1993, 6). While one can never befullyready for novelties, the contributors to this issue show that developments in interwar physics did prepare participants for their cold war interactions with industry and government.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-78
Author(s):  
Natalya S. Maiorova

The article is devoted to the analysis of the results of population censuses conducted in the USSR in 1937 and 1939, in relation to Ivanovo and Yaroslavl regions. The research is based on census materials that had been classified for a long time and published only in the 1990s. Of all the various aspects of the censuses, the author's attention was focused on only three – population, its social structure, and religious composition. Based on the results of the censuses, conclusions are drawn about the prevalence of women in the region, both in rural areas and in cities. It was women who, in the conditions of World War II, became the strong rear, on whose shoulders the front was supported by food, uniforms, and weapons. The urban population was greater in Ivanovo Region, which was explained by its characteristic high rates of industrialisation. The 1937 census recorded a fairly high level of religiosity, despite the largely anti-religious policy that had been carried out for almost 20 years. The war led to an increase in religiosity, probably because often only faith could become the core around which daily life was built, full of deprivation, anxiety and fear for loved ones.


1970 ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Lebanese American University

The International Board on Books for Young people", (IBBY), was founded in 1951, thanks to the efforts made by Jella Lepman, a British social worker who worked in Germany in the aftermath of World War II and there developed the idea that children's books could serve as a foundation for international understanding


Author(s):  
Anika Roberts-Stahlbrand

This article will apply food regime theory to an examination of the rise and fall of the apple industry in Nova Scotia between 1862 and 1980. From the 1860s until World War II, apples were a booming cross-Atlantic export business that continued the colonial bonds to Britain. But after the war, Britain developed its own domestic apple industry, and Nova Scotia apples failed to capture a loyal and secure market based on taste or quality. This led to the decline of the industry by the 1980s. Since that time, a new local apple industry based on taste and craft processing has arisen in Nova Scotia.  This article affirms the broad historical analysis of food regime theory, while drawing attention to the need for an ecological enhancement of the theory. 


Politik ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ove Korsgaard

After World War II, there was broad consensus that schools in Denmark should educate for democracy. But there was no consensus on the role of the state: Should the state ensure that everyone receives a democratic education? Or should the state ensure pluralism, and remain neutral in relation to different life philosophies? Or must both the state and citizens develop a knowledgeable stance in relation to democracy’s fundamental dilemmas? It was without doubt the liberal position that became most influential in post-war Danish educational policy. The core of this strategy was that in a democracy the state should adopt a neutral stance towards the various philosophies of life. However, with the values-political turn of recent years the liberal position is now in retreat. This new trend became clear in 2000, with the then Minister of Education Margrethe Vestager’s manifesto Values in the Real World, in which she stressed that „Now more than ever we need to put in words just what attitudes and values we hold in common“. And the present government has focused on the same issue since 2001, and has commissioned among other things a literary canon, a cultural canon and a democracy canon. The activist values policies of recent years have once again given rise to a number of questions concerning democratic upbringing and the role of the state in efforts to strengthen society’s cohesiveness. 


2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 597-621
Author(s):  
Rea Amit

Imamura Taihei (1911–86) is considered by many to be the first film theorist in Japan, and he is known chiefly for his two grand theories on documentary film and animation. Yet, at the same time, Imamura also developed a third, no less ambitious theory, that of “Cinema and Japanese Art,” in which he specified the national characteristics of Japanese cinema. This essay concentrates on this third and less studied thesis. Although the argument Imamura puts forth in the thesis is elusive, aspects in it enable an interpretation of Japanese cinema along lines of phenomenological critical theory. From this perspective, it appears that Imamura establishes a theorization of national cinema that is predicated not on film as a product, or ontological aspects of what films project, but rather on the phenomenology of the film-watching experience. In effect, the thesis thus defines Japanese cinema not as the total sum of films produced in Japan, or by Japanese filmmakers, but as a shared watching experience of films regardless of their country of origin. Measuring Imamura’s thesis against other theories of Japanese national cinema that were published around the same time, during World War II, the essay argues that his theorization is in fact flexible enough to withstand more recent critique leveled against the notion of national cinema, and even allows radical new ways of thinking about national cinema in the contemporary moment of a new media environment and increasing transnational cultural flows.


Author(s):  
Noah Tsika

Focusing on World War II and its immediate aftermath, this chapter offers a genealogy of a particular documentary tendency, one tied to the concurrent rise of military psychiatry and of the military-industrial state. As the psychiatric treatment of combat-traumatized soldiers gained greater institutional and cultural visibility, so did particular techniques associated with—but scarcely limited to—documentary film. This chapter looks at some of the subjectivities—some of the “private visions” and “careerist goals”—of military psychiatrists and other psychological experts whose influence is abundantly evident in a range of “documentary endeavors,” including those carried out (often simultaneously) by Hollywood studios and various military filmmaking outfits, from the Signal Corps Photographic Center to the Training Films and Motion Picture Branch of the Bureau of Aeronautics.


Author(s):  
Seth Bernstein

World War II was the ultimate test of Soviet youth culture. The USSR’s heavy reliance on youth in the pre-war period increased as Stalin’s regime drafted youth into the army, in factories and as keepers of order on the home front. Soviet practices of mobilization and coercion developed during the interwar period continued and intensified during the war. As victory appeared imminent, youth leaders pondered how wartime brutalization and the compromises young people had made under occupation had changed the requirements of official youth culture. The victory reinforced the righteousness of pre-war practices as the correct way to raise youth under socialism.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naoki Sakai

In The End of Pax Americana, Naoki Sakai focuses on U.S. hegemony's long history in East Asia and the effects of its decline on contemporary conceptions of internationality. Engaging with themes of nationality in conjunction with internationality, the civilizational construction of differences between East and West, and empire and decolonization, Sakai focuses on the formation of a nationalism of hikikomori, or “reclusive withdrawal”—Japan’s increasingly inward-looking tendency since the late 1990s, named for the phenomenon of the nation’s young people sequestering themselves from public life. Sakai argues that the exhaustion of Pax Americana and the post--World War II international order—under which Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and China experienced rapid modernization through consumer capitalism and a media revolution—signals neither the “decline of the West” nor the rise of the East, but, rather a dislocation and decentering of European and North American political, economic, diplomatic, and intellectual influence. This decentering is symbolized by the sense of the loss of old colonial empires such as those of Japan, Britain, and the United States.


2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-382
Author(s):  
Xunwu Chen ◽  

Kant bequeaths to the present discourse of cosmopolitanism the question of how a constitutionalized global order without a world state is possible. At the core of the matter is what a legitimate public authority as the necessary enactor of the cosmopolitan sovereignty is. Habermas’s answer that this is a three-tiered, networked realm of public authority is a plausible one. The key to Habermas’s answer is the concept of a political constitution for a pluralist world. If such a constitution is possible, I believe that we need a new concept of constitution as a body politic of norms, statute laws, common laws, legal precedents, and international treaties; on this point, we should take the UK constitution as the paradigm and recognize that since the end of World War II, such a body politic of norms, statute laws, common laws, legal precedents, and international treaties of the global human community has been emerging.


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