The Battle of Žižkov: Urban Planners’ Transition from Heritage Protection to Neoliberal Discursive Planning

2020 ◽  
pp. 009614422090888
Author(s):  
Petr Roubal

On the example of working-class Prague quarter of Žižkov, the article studies the interrelation between heritage protection of late nineteenth-century tenement housing and neoliberal city policies after 1989. It locates the common root of both phenomena in the strong sense of crisis of socialist modernist urbanism among urban planners and architects since the early 1970s. The criticism of socialist urbanism culminated shortly before the Velvet Revolution of 1989 in a public struggle against demolition and redevelopment of the entire Žižkov quarter, led by a group of young architects. The article concludes by describing a bitter victory as the quarter’s architecture was eventually saved, while neoliberal urban policies and gentrification eroded its working-class nature. This process illustrates a major shift in urban expertise from social planning under socialism to neoliberal discursive planning in which a “story” of a city is constructed through preservation of belle-époque tenement housing.

Author(s):  
Brian Porter

This chapter argues that as recently as the 1880s, Catholicism, as it existed in Poland at the time, was still somewhat resistant to expressions of antisemitism. Catholicism, in other words, was configured in such a way in the late nineteenth century as to make it hard for antisemites to express their views without moving to the very edges of the Catholic framework. Catholicism and antisemitism did overlap at the time, but the common ground was much more confined than it would later become. If one moves forward fifty years, to the 1930s, one sees a different picture: the discursive boundaries of Catholicism in Poland had shifted to such a degree that antisemitism became not only possible, but also difficult to avoid. The upshot of this argument is that Catholicism in Poland is not antisemitic in any sort of essential way, and that religion did not directly generate the forms of hatred that would become so deadly and virulent in the early twentieth century. None the less, Catholicism did become amenable to antisemitism in Poland, so much so that the Church in Poland between the wars was one of the country's leading sources of prejudice and animosity.


Author(s):  
Robert Jackson

Chapter 5 examines lynching, a longstanding practice in the United States that became more regionally associated with the South in the late nineteenth century, as a force in film history from the earliest days of the medium through a cycle of anti-lynching films during the years around midcentury. Paradoxically, the Western genre is important here, absorbing many of the common rituals and generating a powerful ideological defense of lynching. During different periods across this half-century, different attitudes about lynching led to a variety of film representations, culminating with a number of films in the late 1930s and beyond questioning both lynching and its cinematic traces.


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 241-266
Author(s):  
Laura Lammasniemi

A fixed legal age of consent is used to determine when a person has the capacity to consent to sex yet in the late Victorian period the idea became a vehicle through which to address varied social concerns, from child prostitution and child sexual abuse to chastity and marriageability of working-class girls. This article argues that the Criminal Law Amendment Act (CLAA) 1885, the Act that raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen, and its application were driven by constructions of gender in conjunction with those of social class and working class family. The article firstly argues that CLAA 1885 and related campaigns reinforced class boundaries, and largely framed the working class family as absent, thereby, requiring the law to step in as a surrogate parent to protect the girl child. Secondly, the paper focuses on narratives emerging from the archives and argues that while narratives of capacity and protection in particular were key concepts behind reforms, the courts showed limited understanding of these terms. Instead, the courts focused on notions resistance, consent, and untrustworthiness of the victim, even when these concepts were not relevant to the proceedings due to victims' young age.


Slavic Review ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Brower

Protest action accompanied by violence was widespread among Russian factory workers during the late nineteenth century. The phenomenon was noted by tsarist officials and radicals alike, but historians since then have paid little attention to the problem. This neglect has contributed to a distorted picture of the working-class movement and of the relations between Russian workers and factory and state authorities. In recent years it has become a truism to affirm that collective violence constitutes evidence of profound social stress. It is also true that the form and character of the violence in certain historical circumstances provide unique insight into the attitudes and expectations of groups, such as factory workers, otherwise unable to express their views. The violent actions of Russian workers are particularly important to an understanding of the origins of the revolutionary movement among the workers in the early twentieth century. What form did these actions take? Who were the participants, and what goals did they seek to attain? How did the incidence and nature of the actions change over the last decades of the century? Although the evidence is not abundant, answers to these questions suggest that collective violence played an important part in the working-class movement in the late nineteenth century.


2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 231-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart Ooghe

Since the creation of its first disciplinary histories in the late nineteenth century, Near Eastern archaeology has perceived its origins largely in terms of individual breakthroughs, following the common precepts of a pre-Annales historiography. The founding figures mentioned in the works of Rogers, Hilprecht, Budge or Parrot were either great explorers, great scholars or, most importantly, great excavators. From Della Valle's first tentative explorations at Babylon in 1616 to the major excavations at Nineveh and Babylon three centuries later, Near Eastern archaeology saw itself as the fruit of individual discovery. ‘Real’ archaeology was furthermore perceived as a natural rather than a human science and subsequently taken to have originated in nineteenth-century positivism; earlier accounts were hinted at in only the briefest fashion.


1986 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 28-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie Murphy

This is a tale of two cities: Chicago and Paris. They were different worlds, one the gem of western Europe, the other the gem of the prairies, yet both had a working-class movement in the 1870s and 1880s that produced a unique set of historical events which have served a symbolic function of communicating between one side of the globe and another. To illustrate these events as they appeared to one continent from the other I will begin with Chicago and demonstrate how the Paris Commune served as a symbolic event which gave meaning to local political struggles in the Windy City. Then, as the Haymarket Affair of 1886 unfolds, I will shift to Paris and the left-wing press as it tried to translate Chicago events into something meaningful for French workers. If these were the best of times and worst of times for workers in the late nineteenth century, then it is worth exploring the uses of these events in the creation of a working-class language of internationalism.


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