Memory Politics: Growth Coalitions, Urban Pasts, and the Creation of “Historic” Philadelphia

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 330-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Anthony Hunter ◽  
Kevin Loughran ◽  
Gary Alan Fine
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Memory Politics ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
Community History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Heritage Politics ◽  
Demographic Shifts ◽  
Growth Coalitions ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
American Cities

Facing economic changes and disinvestment, powerful actors in post–World War II American cities attempted to define the city as a space of public culture to confront demographic shifts, suburban growth, and the breakdown of community. Some civic actors, especially in older Eastern cities, looked to a nostalgic and heroic past where a theme of American identity became salient as a result of the Cold War and rapid cultural and economic changes in the postwar era. To achieve urban growth, elites argued for urban redevelopment policies based on historical themes and imagery. We examine the sociopolitical history of Philadelphia's Independence Hall redevelopment project (1948–1959) and the development of the adjacent Society Hill neighborhood (1959–1964). We offer the framework of memory politics—political contests over the use of shared community history—to examine how growth coalitions implement plans for economic growth, tourism, and civic allegiance. Philadelphia, particularly during the postwar era, exemplifies how heritage, politics, and place dynamically collide and direct urban development.

scholarly journals Polio and Disability in Cold War Hungary

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dora Vargha
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Physical Health ◽  
Medical Treatment ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

Concerns over children’s physical health and ability were shared experiences across post–World War II societies, and the figure of the child was often used as a tool to reach over the Iron Curtain. However, key differences in how children with polio were perceived, and as a result treated, followed Cold War fault lines. Concepts of an individual’s role in society shaped medical treatment and views of disability, which contributed to the celebrated polio child in one environment and her invisibility in another. Thus, through the lens of disability, new perspectives have emerged on the history of the Cold War, polio, and childhood.

Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization

2018 ◽  
pp. 350-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Mark ◽  
Quinn Slobodian
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
New States ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter places Eastern Europe into a broader history of decolonization. It shows how the region’s own experience of the end of Empire after the World War I led its new states to consider their relationships with both European colonialism and those were struggling for their future liberation outside their continent. Following World War II, as Communist regimes took power in Eastern Europe, and overseas European Empires dissolved in Africa and Asia, newly powerful relationships developed. Analogies between the end of empire in Eastern Europe and the Global South, though sometimes tortured and riddled with their own blind spots, were nonetheless potent rhetorical idioms, enabling imagined solidarities and facilitating material connections in the era of the Cold War and non-alignment. After the demise of the so-called “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, analogies between the postcolonial and the postcommunist condition allowed for further novel equivalencies between these regions to develop.

Such a State of Uncertainty, Caution, and Fear, 1946–1961

Pauli Murray ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 145-205
Author(s):  
Troy R. Saxby
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Physical And Mental Health ◽  
Employment Opportunities ◽  
Health Concerns ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
Women Lawyers ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines Pauli Murray’s life during the Cold War era. Preferential treatment for returned servicemen and McCarthyism further disadvantaged Murray’s employment opportunities in the post-World War II period. Most notably, Cornell University denied her employment because of her “past associations.” Murray responded by writing Proud Shoes, a history of her maternal grandparents. Physical and mental health concerns continued to plague Murray, and as one of only a few independent black women lawyers in New York City, Murray struggled to make a living. In the late 1950s she became a corporate lawyer, wrote poetry, and then went to Ghana to teach law and explore her own racial identity.

Fugitive Leverage: Commercial Banks, Sovereign Debt, and Cold War Crisis in Poland, 1980–1982

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRITZ BARTEL
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Commercial Banks ◽  
Sovereign Debt ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
Global Finance ◽  
Financial History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Communist Countries

This article examines a familiar Cold War event, the Polish Crisis of the early 1980s, but from an unfamiliar perspective: international financial history. Historians have yet to examine how the growing international activity of Western commercial banks and the Eastern Bloc’s heavy borrowing on international capital markets during the 1970s influenced the course of the late Cold War. This article covers the history of the Eastern Bloc’s largest borrower—Poland—and its road to sovereign default in 1981. It examines how financial diplomacy among banks, communist countries, and the U.S. government catalyzed the formation of the labor union Solidarność (Solidarity). Ultimately, this article speaks to an important theme in the history of U.S. capitalism since World War II; namely, how the construction of global finance influenced U.S. foreign policy. The end of the Cold War in the fall of 1989 was the result not only of communism’s loss of legitimacy among the peoples of Eastern Europe, but also its loss of creditworthiness on global financial markets.

COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE USES OF TRADITION: ROBERT REDFIELD AND ALTERNATIVE VISIONS OF MODERNIZATION DURING THE COLD WAR

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 565-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICOLE SACKLEY
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
Talcott Parsons ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Alternative Vision ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University

The history of the rise and fall of “modernization theory” after World War II has been told as a story of Talcott Parsons, Walt Rostow, and other US social scientists who built a general theory in US universities and sought to influence US foreign policy. However, in the 1950s anthropologist Robert Redfield and his Comparative Civilizations project at the University of Chicago produced an alternative vision of modernization—one that emphasized intellectual conversation across borders, the interrelation of theory and fieldwork, and dialectical relations of tradition and modernity. In tracing the Redfield project and its legacies, this essay aims to broaden intellectual historians’ sense of the complexity, variation, and transnational currents within postwar American discourse about modernity and tradition.

Arab-Israeli Wars and US Foreign Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Anziska
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Gaza Strip ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
Occupied Territories ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Gaza Strip ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict has reflected dueling impulses at the heart of US-Middle East relations since World War II: growing support for Zionism and Israeli statehood on the one hand, the need for cheap oil resources and strong alliances with Arab states on the other, unfolding alongside the ebb and flow of concerns over Soviet influence in the region during the Cold War. These tensions have tracked with successive Arab–Israeli conflagrations, from the 1948 war through the international conflicts of 1967 and 1973, as well as shifting modes of intervention in Lebanon, and more recently, the Palestinian uprisings in the occupied territories and several wars on the Gaza Strip. US policy has been shaped by diverging priorities in domestic and foreign policy, a halting recognition of the need to tackle Palestinian national aspirations, and a burgeoning peace process which has drawn American diplomats into the position of mediating between the parties. Against the backdrop of regional upheaval, this long history of involvement continues into the 21st century as the unresolved conflict between Israel and the Arab world faces a host of new challenges.

Social and Economic Changes in Japan at the End of the Cold War

1995 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-143
Author(s):  
Akira Kojima
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
New World ◽  
World Order ◽  
New World Order ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Cold War

During the Cold War, relationships between governments were fixed by the powerful polarities of East and West. With the end of the Cold War, these relationships became more fluid and more volatile. A multipolar series of forccs--what we optimistically term the New World Order--has now replaced the bipolar forces that defined relationships among nations since the end of World War II.

A Brief History of Science Communication in Australia

2014 ◽  
Vol 150 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen Burns
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Communication ◽  
Children's Television ◽  
Science Content ◽  
Space Race ◽  
Energy Science ◽  
Commercial Networks ◽  
War Effort ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

Early science reporting in Australia – up to and including the 1940s – was often sourced from overseas. During and after World War II, attention turned to applied science, at first for the war effort and afterwards to rebuild the nation. From the late 1950s to the late 1970s, entrepreneurs in science and media in Sydney worked together to provide science material in commercial outlets as well as for the ABC. In the context of the space race, the Cold War and atomic energy, science communication flourished from the 1950s to the 1970s. Since then, science content has been widespread in the television schedules of commercial networks in forms such as children's television, lifestyle programs and news items, and is also apparent in community radio schedules as well as on ABC television and radio. Claims that Australia has little science communication may be based on too narrow a view of what constitutes science content.

Method Acting and the Cold War

2000 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-68
Author(s):  
Bruce McConachie
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Method Acting ◽  
Acting Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Group Theatre ◽  
Moscow Art Theatre

Triumphalist accounts of the spread of “the Method” in post-World War II America generally explain its success as the victory of natural truths over benighted illusions about acting. In Method Actors: Three Generations of An American Acting Style, for instance, Steve Vineberg follows his summary of the primary attributes of “method” acting with the comment: “These concerns weren't invented by Stanislavski or his American successors; they emerged naturally out of the two thousand-year history of Western acting.” Hence, the final triumph of “the Method” was natural, even inevitable. Vineberg's statement, however, raises more questions than it answers. Why did it take two thousand years for actors and theorists of acting to get it right? Or, to localize the explanation to the United States, why did more American actors, directors, and playwrights not jump on the Stanislavski bandwagon and reform the American theatre after the appearance of the Moscow Art Theatre in New York in 1923 and the subsequent lectures and classes from Boleslavski and others? The Group Theatre demonstrated the power of Stanislavski-derived acting techniques in the 1930s, but their substantial successes barely dented the conventional wisdom about acting theory and technique in the professional theatre. Yet, in the late 1940s and early fifties, “method” acting, substantially unchanged from its years in the American Laboratory and Group theatres, took Broadway and Hollywood by storm.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document