Authoritarian State, Dynamic Society, Failed Imperialist Power, 1878–1914

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helmut Walser Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Local Level ◽  
National Level ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Authoritarian State ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
White Hegemony

This article focuses on statehood, society, and the failed imperialist powers that continued to rampage Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. A social history of German politics is given in this article. It begins with analyzing the meaning of Kaiserreich and emphasizing its inner logic, and endogenous social and political processes. This article concentrates on the relationship between state, society, and democracy, and argues that the essential conflicts of the Kaiserreich involved the contradictory integration of a newly-formed, authoritarian national state, with an exceedingly dynamic and mobile society, into a competitive world of overseas empires in the process of imposing white hegemony on large parts of the globe. The interpretive emphasis, which is on the national level, rather than the state or local level, does not presuppose that endogenous structural elements brought about the crisis of the late imperial period.

Policing Prostitution

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siobhán Hearne
Keyword(s):  
Urban Communities ◽  
Social History ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Commercial Sex ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Urban Problem ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Imperial State

Policing Prostitution examines the complex world of commercial sex in the final two decades of the Russian Empire before its collapse in 1917. From the 1840s until 1917, prostitution was legally tolerated across the Empire under a system known as regulation. Medical-police were in charge of compiling information about registered prostitutes and ensuring that they followed the strict rules prescribed by the imperial state governing their visibility and behaviour. The vast majority of women who sold sex hailed from the lower classes, as did their managers and clients. Official interest in prostitution generated a mass of documentation, which allows us to glimpse the lives and challenges of various groups of the Empire’s urban lower classes, including women who sold sex, their clients, brothel madams, police, and wider urban communities. In the late imperial period, prostitution was not just an urban ‘problem’ to be controlled and contained, but also a lucrative commodity due to the formal and informal financial relationships forged between brothel madams, registered prostitutes, and the police. This study is a social history of prostitution, drawing on archival material from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. It focuses on how regulation was implemented, experienced, and resisted in various urban centres in the northwest of the Russian Empire, and how everyday experiences of regulation varied widely from place to place. In principle, the tsarist state regulated prostitution in the name of public order and public health; in practice, that regulation was both modulated by provincial police forces who had different local priorities, resources, and strategies, and contested by registered prostitutes, brothel madams, and others who interacted with the world of commercial sex.

Die Bundeswehr und die Belgischen Streitkräfte in Deutschland

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas Springer
Keyword(s):  
Local Level ◽  
Military Training ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
History Of ◽  
Military Training Areas ◽  
The Military ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Peak Phase ◽  
East West

This study is dedicated to the regional history of the East-West conflict on the basis of the relationship between the Germany military and the Belgian armed forces stationed in Germany. The central question it addresses is which factors were largely responsible for the interdependence between actors and institutions of both armies. In addition to analysing the limited time of the peak phase of Belgian military deployment in the Federal Republic 1946–1990, the book concentrates regionally on the military training areas of Vogelsang in the Eifel and the Wahner Heide near Cologne as military contact zones. For this purpose, the author evaluates unpublished archival sources at the local level for the first time.

Framing The Fosters: jokes, racism and Black and Asian voices in British comedy television

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Schaffer
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Black British ◽  
Stand Up Comedy ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Cultural Leaders ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter interrogates the relationship between television comedy, power and racial politics in post-war Britain. In a period where Black and Asian Britons were forced to negotiate racism as a day-to-day reality, the essay questions the role played by television comedy in reflecting and shaping British multicultural society. Specifically, this chapter probes Black and Asian agency in comedy production, questioning who the joke makers were and what impact this had on the development of comedy and its reception. The work of scholars of Black and Asian comedy television such as Sarita Malik, and of Black stand-up comedy such as Stephen Small, has helped us to understand that Black- and Asian-led British comedy emerged belatedly in the 1980s and 1990s, hindered by the historical underrepresentation of these communities in British cultural production and the disinclination of British cultural leaders to address this problem. This chapter uses these scholarly frames of reference, alongside research that addresses the social and political functions of comedy, to re-open the social history of Black British communities in post-war Britain through the story of sitcom.

scholarly journals Prenatal Diagnosis in France: Between Regulation of Practices and Professional Autonomy

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabelle Ville
Keyword(s):  
Prenatal Diagnosis ◽  
Pregnancy Termination ◽  
Local Level ◽  
National Level ◽  
Professional Autonomy ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Official Policy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Scientific Framework

Prenatal diagnosis (PND) was introduced in France in the 1970s on the initiative of medical researchers and clinicians. For many years the regulation of practices was self-imposed, decentralised and idiosyncratic. The advent of ‘therapeutic modernity’ in the 1990s gave rise to an ethical, legal and scientific framework designed to homogenise PND at a national level, with the creation of multidisciplinary centres (CPDPN) and theAgence de la biomédecine. This article first recovers the history of PND in France. It then compares the activities of two CPDPNs, using ethnographic fieldwork and by analysing national quantitative data compiled by theAgence. It argues that the official policy of nationally homogeneous practices is not born out in practice, at the local level. This lack of homogeneity is most apparent in the number of authorisations for pregnancy termination due to foetal malformation, which varies considerably from one centre to another. Rooted in local culture, this variation relates to organisational methods, decision-making processes and variable levels of tolerance towards the risk of disability. Foetal medicine practitioners, thus, maintain a certain amount of autonomy that is collective rather than individual and that is reflected in the particular ‘identity’ of a given centre.

Art and its Objects: William Ivins and the Reproduction of Art

1987 ◽  
Vol 35 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 65-98
Author(s):  
Gordon Fyfe
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Social History ◽  
Visual Communication ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Photographic Reproduction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Art Reproduction ◽  
The Relationship

This paper is a critique of the contribution of William Ivins's Prints and Visual Communication (1953) to an understanding of the meaning of fine art reproductions. Ivins showed that photographic reproduction was constructed in relation to, and displaced, older ways of reproducing art which were carried out by handicraft engravers. His analysis alerts us to the fact that ambiguity characterized art reproduction before photographs. Art reproductions, then, were interpretations in line based on conventional modes of representation – what Ivins calls a visual syntax. In this respect he enhances our understanding of the social construction of the artist. For Ivins the social history of reproduction seems to end with the camera. This completed an individuation of creativity ushered in with the Renaissance, but which was always qualified by the interfering visual syntax of craftsmen-interpreters. It is argued that the value of Ivins's account resides in its reconstruction of the relationship between handicraft engraving, fine art reproduction and aesthetic objects that have long since slipped from our consciousness.

Win the match and vote for me: the politicisation of Ghana's Accra Hearts of Oak and Kumasi Asante Kotoko football clubs

2009 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin S. Fridy ◽  
Victor Brobbey
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Social History ◽  
Football Clubs ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Common Perception ◽  
Athletic Competitions

ABSTRACTThere is a common perception in Ghana that Accra Hearts of Oak is the soccer club of the National Democratic Congress, and Kumasi Asante Kotoko that of the New Patriotic Party. In this paper we explore the roots of these perceptions by examining the social history of these two clubs specifically, and the Ghanaian soccer league system in general, with an eye for the actors, practices and events that injected political airs into purportedly ‘apolitical’ athletic competitions. With this social history clearly defining the popularly perceived ‘us’ versus ‘them’ of the Hearts/Kotoko rivalry, we analyse on the basis of a modest survey some of the assumptions these widely held stereotypes rely upon. We find that ethnicity and location matter both in terms of predicting one's affinity for a given soccer club and partisan inclinations. These factors do not, however, completely dispel the relationship between sports and politics as spurious. Though not conclusive, there is enough evidence collected in the survey to suggest that one's preferred club, even when controlling for ethnicity and location, does have an effect on one's partisan leanings, or perhaps vice versa. This finding highlights the independent role that often-understudied cultural politics can play.

Law and the State in Boris Mironov's Sotsial´naia istoriia Rossii

Slavic Review ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 558-565
Author(s):  
William G. Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Nuclear Family ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
Demographic Processes ◽  
History Of

A forum on Boris Mironov's Russian and English editions of The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917 (2000) offers the comments of four scholars on different aspects of Mironov's work. David L. Ransel introduces the forum with a consideration of whether Russian and western historical scholarship has been or should be converging, and he reviews the Russian-language response to Mironov's book. William G. Wagner discusses Mironov's key conclusions: that the imperial period was marked by the development of a more individualistic personality, the democratic nuclear family, civil society, and a state order based on the rule of law. He questions, however, the validity of the modernization paradigm as an adequate tool for analyzing these developments. Willard Sunderland comments on the use of the concept of empire in Mironov's book, calling attention to the assertion that imperial Russia was a “normal” European state and that it was not a “true colonial state.” The focus of the book, he argues, remains Russian society within the space of the empire, not the society of the empire as a whole. Steven L. Hoch considers Mironov's chapter on demographic processes, criticizing the use of demographic theory and its application to problems such as fertility and mortality. He also argues that Mironov accepts too uncritically the utility of the statistical data at hand. Boris Mironov responds to Wagnar, Sunderland, and Hoch in turn.

scholarly journals Den norske videobutikken: 1979–2017

Nordlit ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marius Øfsti
Keyword(s):  
Local Level ◽  
National Level ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Local Council ◽  
Home Entertainment ◽  
Local Newspapers ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Monopoly ◽  
Trade Magazines ◽  
Selection Of

De første norske videobutikkene åpnet dørene i 1979 og de siste stengte i 2017. I løpet av denne tidsperioden rakk de å bryte NRKs monopol på film og tv-serier i hjemmet, de ble utskjelt, de ble en av de viktigste kulturinstitusjonene i landet og de tilbød et relativt stort utvalg i film. Ved å studere bransjeblader, annonser, lokalaviser og kommunale arkiver tegner denne artikkelen et bilde av de norske videobutikkenes historie på nasjonalt plan og utdyper dette med en lokal case.The first Norwegian video-stores opened its doors in 1979 and the last ones closed in 2017. During this time, they were the first to break the state monopoly on filmed home entertainment. The video-stores became notorious, but they also established themselves as some of the most important cultural institutions in the country, with a relatively wide selection of films to offer customers. By studying trade magazines, advertisements, local newspapers and local council archives, this article traces the history of the Norwegian video-stores on a national level and, through the use of one case example, on a local level.

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