scholarly journals Looted Art and Restitution in the Twentieth Century – Towards a Global Perspective

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-518
Author(s):  
Bianca Gaudenzi ◽  
Astrid Swenson

Introducing the Journal of Contemporary History Special Issue ‘The Restitution of Looted Art in the 20th Century’, this article proposes a framework for writing the history of looting and restitution in transnational and global perspective. By comparing and contextualizing instances of looting and restitution in different geographical and temporal contexts, it aims to overcome existing historiographical fragmentations and move past the overwhelming focus on the specificities of Nazi looting through an extended timeframe that inserts the Second World War into a longer perspective from the nineteenth century up to present day restitution practices. Particular emphasis is put on the interlinked histories of denazification and decolonization. Problematizing existing analytical, chronological and geographical frameworks, the article suggests how a combination of comparative, entangled and global history approaches can open up promising new avenues of research. It draws out similarities, differences and connections between processes of looting and restitution in order to discuss the extent to which looting and restitution were shaped by – and shaped – changing global networks.

Südosteuropa ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gentiana Kera

AbstractThe Second World War in Albania was a central topic of socialist historiography because of the importance laid upon the National Liberation War for the legitimation of the establishment of communist rule in 1944. History writing was a very centralized process, controlled by party institutions responsible for safeguarding the implementation of Marxist‒Leninist principles and party lines. Since the 1990s, the history of the Second World War has been revised in the framework of a general revision of Albanian national history. History writing developed as an open process and now included historians from countries other than Albania, as opposed to the previous state socialist isolation. The extent to which the war history had been distorted and manipulated during socialism has influenced the subsequent process of rewriting that first focused on adjusting the existing narratives. Thus, despite an increasing variety of research topics, the historiography on wartime Albania has remained dominated by political and military history, and by the national master narrative.


Author(s):  
Carlo Ghezzi

The history of Computer Science and Engineering (Informatics) began internationally after the Second World War. In the last decade of the twentieth century it bacame one of the disciplines with highest impact on economy, industry, and society. The development of Informatics at Politecnico started when the first computer was brought to Italy from the USA by Prof. Luigi Dadda and the first experiments and investigations were launched. Since then Informatics has been continuously growing until today it became the engine of modern society, often called the Information Society. This paper reports on the main developments of Informatics at Politecnico and the main contributions achieved nationally and internationally in education and research.


Author(s):  
Francisco Sáez de Adana Herrero

This article analyses the Manhattan Project comic-book series, which recounts an alternative ending to the Second World War, where the Manhattan Project hides another mission more closely related to science fiction. Here we discuss how the concept of the so-called «imaginary life», a term coined by Marcel Schwob, has been applied to the history of science in the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Jürgen Osterhammel

This chapter examines different approaches to global history. Modern world history differs from older universal-historical constructions in that it presupposes an empirical idea of geography and of both the unity and plurality of humanity’s historical experience. After the Second World War, historians paid more attention to the interaction of the nation-state (the local) and the world (the global). The newer global history, while it does not negate the nation-state, strives to understand the reasons for the success of the West, without however reverting to a Eurocentric and essentializing perspective. Aware of the constructedness of history, it nonetheless pays attention to agency in the past, and to the plurality of perspectives and divergent historical paths. It does so by focusing on topics such as the history of migration, the environment, and economic globalization.


Scott Lithgow ◽  
2005 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Lewis Johnman ◽  
Hugh Murphy

This initial chapter outlines the founding of the Scotts Shipyard of Greenock in 1711, and follows the history of the company through to the end of the Second World War. It documents the company’s major accomplishments, business developments, finances, ownerships, and technical developments throughout the period before the postwar expansion. Events considered include the 1794 construction of the timber vessel, Caledonia, the largest Scottish vessel of the period; an association with the Admiralty; links with Liverpool shipyards; trade links with China and Hong Kong; the quick transition to steam technology; naval contracts; the twentieth century increase in naval demand; and secretive membership in the ‘Warship Group’ of private shipbuilders - a ring that aimed to protect prices from competition. The chapter concludes in 1945, noting that though the forward-thinking Scotts took advantage of wartime inflation and a boom in ship prices for financial stability, no one could predict the size of the postwar maritime expansion that would follow.


2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-585
Author(s):  
Gábor Győrffy ◽  
Zoltán Tibori-Szabó ◽  
Júlia-Réka Vallasek

Sabbatarians were the only proselyte religious community that had an official institutional form in nineteenth-century Europe. This study aims to present the history and gradual disintegration of the Sabbatarian community and their acceptance of a common fate with Transylvanian Jewry during the Second World War. This is realized by, first, outlining the historical context of the formation of Sabbatarianism; second, by describing the social and political circumstances of Transylvanian Jews in the first half of the twentieth century; and third, by giving a detailed presentation of the 1944 deportations and other related events.


2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Marks

Psychotherapy was an invention of European modernity, but as the 20th century unfolded, and we trace how it crossed national and continental borders, its goals and the particular techniques by which it operated become harder to pin down. This introduction briefly draws together the historical literature on psychotherapy in Europe, asking comparative questions about the role of location and culture, and networks of transmission and transformation. It introduces the six articles in this special issue on Greece, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Russia, Britain and Sweden as well as its parallel special issue of History of Psychology on ‘Psychotherapy in the Americas’. It traces what these articles tell us about how therapeutic developments were entangled with the dramatic, and often traumatic, political events across the continent: in the wake of the Second World War, the emergence of Communist and authoritarian regimes, the establishment of welfare states and the advance of neoliberalism.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Kira Mahamud Angulo ◽  
Anna Ascenzi

This special issue examines textbooks in countries undergoing political transition, change, and convulsion. The articles consider textbooks from countries shifting from one political regime to another, “at different speeds and with different priorities,”1 in the second half of the twentieth century. The articles raise a number of questions. What happens to textbooks during the intervals between one form of government and another? How does the information contained in textbooks change during these intervals of instability and uncertainty, and during the phases of the construction and consolidation of a new political regime?


Author(s):  
Tamara Nikolchenko ◽  
◽  
Maria Nikolchenko ◽  

The article covers the complex processes of folk art during the Second World War, in particular slave poetry. In times of war, the creation of folk poetry is intensified, which is caused by the need to respond to events, to record them, above all, in memory. These song responses to events take place on the material of "old" samples of poetry that are already known. And «innovations» are used by participants of events and are saturated with new realities. Such is the folk song of the period of fascist captivity during the Second World War. The genesis of the poetry of captivity of the studied period can be traced on a large factual material, it is proved that genetically slave poetry of the period of the Second World War is connected with the cries of slaves and has its roots in the long history of Ukraine. These motives are still heard in the old Cossack thoughts, in which the lamentation gradually turns into a lyrical song. And during the war troubles of the twentieth century, these songs became relevant and sounded in a modern way. The article analyzes recordings of songs that reflect the grief of young girls taken to forced labor in Germany, the suffering of mothers who lose their children. Most of the analyzed works are stored in the funds of the IMFE of Ukraine, as well as in the own records of the authors of the article. The folklore of captivity, according to the authors of the article, fully reflects the deep universal feelings. It is the basis of artistic culture, because the socio-pragmatic world is conditioned by spiritual ideas about its integrity and ideals. The folklore of captivity, according to the authors of the article, fully reflects the deep universal feelings. It is the basis of artistic culture, because the socio-pragmatic world is conditioned by spiritual ideas about its integrity and ideals.


Südosteuropa ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine Rutar

AbstractIntroducing this special issue on historiographies and debates on the Second World War in Southeastern Europe, the author reflects on the conditionalities of a better balancing of research agendas in terms of the interdependencies between local dynamics and wider scales—be they the regional, national and transnational, or global dimensions of the war. She draws attention to the role the European Union has played in crafting public history, in which processes of ‘internationalizing’ and of ‘nationalizing’ the past have been entangled. She concludes that Southeast Europeanists could greatly enhance international research agendas by taking the lead in fostering a bottom-up, multiscale, and multiperspective history of postimperial, nationalizing societies at war.


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