Censorship: Publish and Be Damned

2014 ◽  
Vol 150 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-40
Author(s):  
Peter Coleman

State censorship in Australia has been rare, controversial and short-lived. There was almost none in the liberal nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the two world wars, the Great Depression and the new age of terrorism led to more determined, if comparatively temporary, attempts to censor publications that advocated sedition or violence. Moral censorship of obscenity was also rare in the nineteenth century, but enjoyed an ‘heroic’ period following the arrival of a new realism in literature and the age of lurid comic books. The internet has made such censorship almost totally ineffective. Blaspheming the Christian religion is no longer treated as a punishable offence, although attacking Islam may still sometimes be deemed actionable in law. The advent of multiculturalism has encouraged legislation to restrict free speech deemed to be ‘hate speech’, but its application has been episodic, unpopular and ineffective. The contest between writers demanding freedom and censors demanding standards is unending. But at the moment, the balance favours writers.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
Quentin Lippmann

This paper studies the evolution of mate preferences throughout the twentieth century in France. I digitized all the matrimonial ads published in France’s best-selling monthly magazine from 1928 to 1994. Using dictionary-based methods, I show that mate preferences were mostly stable during the Great Depression, WWII, and the ensuing economic boom. These preferences started transforming in the late 1960s when economic criteria were progressively replaced by personality criteria. The timing coincides with profound family and demographic changes in French society. These findings suggest that, in the search for a long-term partner, non-material needs have replaced material ones.


2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 591-609
Author(s):  
Maurizio Ferraris

In this paper I try to sketch a brief history of new realism. Starting from nineteenth century idealism, I then move on to discuss twentieth century postmodernism, which, I argue, is the heir of idealism and the theoretical enemy of new realism. Finally, I offer a reconstruction of how and why contemporary new realism came into being and propose a few remarks on its future perspectives.


Author(s):  
Pamela Radcliff

In the turbulent interwar period, the political ‘Left’ was one of the most visible protagonists, with historians continuing to disagree about the role it played in shaping the outcome of the political struggles. Embedded in strong ‘moral narratives’ about the ‘rise of fascism’, the ‘crisis of democracy’, and the nature of the Bolshevik Revolution, the political Left has been vilified or lionized. For the period from the mid-1920s until 1939, both supporters and detractors agree that the Left was on the defensive, internally divided and weakened by the Great Depression and subject to repression by the state, whether democratic, authoritarian, or Stalinist. This chapter argues that the failure narrative should not subsume the vibrant experimentation and rich and contradictory diversity of the Left experience. A portrait emerges of the interwar Left that wrestled with inevitably imperfect and varied solutions to the ‘problem of community life’ in twentieth-century mass society.


Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow

This chapter examines how Kansas experienced a long slide from being the “kernel of the country” to becoming a mere outpost far from the centers of national economic and political influence—a shift that was rooted in economic and demographic changes, but was primarily a matter of cultural redefinition. On those rare occasions in the nineteenth century when the Kansas Republican Party lost power, it regrouped and made a comeback in the next electoral cycle. The chapter first considers how the influence of Republicans and Methodists peaked in 1924, a banner year for the Kansas economy, before discussing the consolidation and further expansion of Kansas churches. It then describes the separation of church and state, along with the rise of fundamentalism and the impact of the Great Depression on Kansas churches. It also explores the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 and the emergence of smaller political and religious movements in Kansas.


2019 ◽  
pp. 153-210
Author(s):  
Susan T. Falck

This chapter recounts the early years of the Natchez Pilgrimage, a heritage tourism enterprise created by the Natchez Garden Club at the height of the Great Depression. The Pilgrimage dramatized a mix of decades-old southern racial ideology and white historical memory that was repackaged for 1930s consumption. Pilgrimage founder Katherine Miller and other leading clubwomen defined their community’s cultural image, while also redefining the meaning of traditional southern womanhood. The Pilgrimage is also the story of how one southern community’s selective expression of historical memory captivated white tourists eager to immerse themselves in the world of the Old South so vividly portrayed by popular writers and entertainers of the 1930s. The widespread appeal of the Pilgrimage home tours and pageant suggests the power of popular culture to shape a tenacious historical memory that remained in force for much of the twentieth century and lingers even today.


2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-23
Author(s):  
Dan Bäcklund ◽  
Kristina Lilja

Adolescents’ income contributions to working-class families decreased between the 1910s and the 1930s in Sweden. This was significant for adolescents’ right to self-determination. By using household budget surveys, this article shows that at the time of the Great Depression, working adolescents paid less at home than had been common at the beginning of the twentieth century. Youth unemployment is one explanation, although it was also a consequence of children keeping more of their earnings for themselves. This development led to rising costs for having children and is interpreted as an aspect of the trade-off between quantity and quality of children.


2020 ◽  
Vol 114 (4) ◽  
pp. 1195-1212
Author(s):  
SCOTT F. ABRAMSON ◽  
SERGIO MONTERO

We develop and estimate a model of learning that accounts for the observed correlation between economic development and democracy and for the clustering of democratization events. In our model, countries’ own and neighbors’ past experiences shape elites’ beliefs about the effects of democracy on economic growth and their likelihood of retaining power. These beliefs influence the choice to transition into or out of democracy. We show that learning is crucial to explaining observed transitions since the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, our model predicts reversals to authoritarianism if the world experienced a growth shock the size of the Great Depression.


1937 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. D. H. Cole

The principal purpose of these notes is to correct certain misunderstandings which I believe to be widely prevalent concerning the character of British Trade Unionism during the quarter of a century which followed the establishment in 1850—1851 of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. The period covered thus begins with the inauguration of the ‘new model’ type of Amalgamated Society, and extends to the end of the trade boom of the early seventies, stopping just short of the Great Depression which set in about 1875.


2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 732-748 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric S. Hintz

By World War I, the public (and later, many historians) had come to believe that teams of anonymous scientists in corporate research and development (R&D) laboratories had displaced “heroic” individual inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell as the wellspring of innovation. However, the first half of the twentieth century was actually a long transitional period when lesser known independents like Chester Carlson (Xerox copier), Earl Tupper (Tupperware), Samuel Ruben (Duracell batteries), and Edwin Land (Polaroid camera) continued to make notable contributions to the overall context of innovation. Accordingly, my dissertation considers the changing fortunes of American independent inventors from approximately 1900 to 1950, a period of expanding corporate R&D, the Great Depression, and two world wars. Contrary to most interpretations of this period, I argue that individual, “post-heroic” inventors remained an important, though less visible, source of inventions in the early twentieth century.


1970 ◽  
pp. 2-4
Author(s):  
Samira Aghacy

Oral history as research approach emerges partly from nineteenth century European romantic nationalism, with its enthusiasm for folk-lore and folk-narrative, partly from journalistic investigation into social conditions, for instance Mayhew's study of the London poor (1861) or, much later, the radio journalist Studs Terkel's classic study of the Great Depression (1970).


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