The wartime narrative in US sociology, 1940–1947

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 526-546 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Warfield Rawls

This is an article about the history of US sociology with systematic intent. It goes back to World War II to recover a wartime narrative context through which sociologists formulated a ‘trauma’ to the discipline and ‘blamed’ qualitative and values-oriented research for damaging the scientific status of sociology. This narrative documents a discussion of the changes that sociologists said needed to be made in sociology as a science to repair its status and reputation. While debates among sociologists about theory and method had always been contentious, the wartime narrative insisted for the first time that sociology be immediately unified around quantitative approaches. The narrative of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ science that developed during the war not only undermined the efforts of social interactionists to theorize social action and social justice, but also derailed Parsons’ pre-war effort to bridge differences. The moral coding that is the legacy of the narrative stigmatized important approaches to sociology, leading to a ‘crisis’ in the 1960s that still haunts the discipline. Disciplinary history has overlooked the wartime narrative with the result that the role played by World War II in effecting this crisis has gone unrecognized.

2018 ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Karol B. JANOWSKI

The paper contains the author’s attempt to review the history of Polish political science from World War II to the present day, its condition and characteristics. The progress political science has made in Poland has been crowned by its achieving the status of a rightful science, recognized by the representatives of numerous renowned fields of study. However, the factors that have contributed to the present status quo have also been administrative, even political. Yet these have neither determined the place of political science nor are they decisive in terms of its status in academia now. The stage of demonstrating its scientific status is already behind political science which, firstly, has demonstrated a clearly defined range of research issues, secondly, has undertaken significant research and arrived at valuable conclusions, and thirdly, has attracted competent, increasingly more versatile and thoroughly educated professionals. At present, political science is facing the challenges reminiscent of those faced by the remaining social sciences. In these terms, political science has not reached the limits of its transformation or capacity.


2008 ◽  
Vol 37 (S1) ◽  
pp. 65-72
Author(s):  
Noah Riseman

Abstract Did you know that a Bathurst Islander captured the first Japanese prisoner of war on Australian soil? Or that a crucifix saved the life of a crashed American pilot in the Gulf of Carpentaria? These are excerpts from the rich array of oral histories of Aboriginal participation in World War II. This paper presents “highlights” from Yolngu oral histories of World War II in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. Using these stories, the paper begins to explore some of the following questions: Why did Yolngu participate in the war effort? How did Yolngu see their role in relation to white Australia? In what ways did Yolngu contribute to the security of Australia? How integral was Yolngu assistance to defence of Australia? Although the answers to these questions are not finite, this paper aims to survey some of the Yolngu history of World War II.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Bień

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> A cartographic map of Gdańsk in the years of 1918&amp;ndash;1939 was very different from the other maps of Polish cities. The reasons for some differences were, among others, the proximity of the sea, the multicultural mindset of the inhabitants of Gdańsk from that period, and some historical events in the interwar period (the founding of the Free City of Gdańsk and the events preceding World War II). Its uniqueness came from the fact that the city of Gdańsk combined the styles of Prussian and Polish housing, as well as form the fact that its inhabitants felt the need for autonomy from the Second Polish Republic. The city aspired to be politically, socially and economically independent.</p><p>The aim of my presentation is to analyze the cartographic maps of Gdańsk, including the changes that had been made in the years of 1918&amp;ndash;1939. I will also comment on the reasons of those changes, on their socio-historical effects on the city, the whole country and Europe.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 271-282
Author(s):  
Laura Emmery

Made in Yugoslavia: Studies in Popular Music (edited by Danijela Špirić Beard and Ljerka Rasmussen) is a fascinating study of how popular music developed in post-World War II Yugoslavia, eventually reaching both unsurpassable popularity in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, and critical acclaim in the West. Through the comprehensive discussion of all popular music trends in Yugoslavia − commercial pop (zabavna-pop), rock, punk, new wave, disco, folk (narodna), and neofolk (novokomponovana) − across all six socialist Yugoslav republics, the reader is given the engrossing socio-cultural and political history of the country, providing the audience with a much-needed and riveting context for understanding the formation and the eventual demise of Tito’s Yugoslavia.


2021 ◽  
pp. 323-350
Author(s):  
Jon D. Wisman

The United States was an anomaly, beginning without clear class distinctions and with substantial egalitarian sentiment. Inexpensive land meant workers who were not enslaved were relatively free. However, as the frontier closed and industrialization took off after the Civil War, inequality soared and workers increasingly lost control over their workplaces. Worker agitation led to improved living standards, but gains were limited by the persuasiveness of the elite’s ideology. The hardships of the Great Depression, however, significantly delegitimated the elite’s ideology, resulting in substantially decreased inequality between the 1930s and 1970s. Robust economic growth following World War II and workers’ greater political power permitted unparalleled improvements in working-class living standards. By the 1960s, for the first time in history, a generation came of age without fear of dire material privation, generating among many of the young a dramatic change in values and attitudes, privileging social justice and self-realization over material concerns.


2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deniz Kuru

This article aims to present a history of International Relations (IR) that looks at the role of three big American foundations (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations) in the development of IR as an academic field in continental Europe. Its framework goes beyond the usual disciplinary history narratives that focus on IR’s US or UK trajectories, pointing instead to American foundations’ interwar and early post–World War II influence on French and German IR. The cases emphasize US foundations’ interactions with European scholars and international scholarly organizations as major factors shaping IR’s developmental pathways. This study offers a way to consider foundations’ role in IR’s gradual academic institutionalization by connecting disciplinary historical approaches to disciplinary sociology. Its sociologically conscious position underlines the significance of American philanthropies in a historical narrative and recognizes the relevance of transnational dynamics by going beyond usual emphases on ideas and national contexts.


1967 ◽  
Vol 167 (1007) ◽  
pp. 134-140

Twenty years have elapsed since the introduction on a wide scale of the residual insecticides in preventive medicine, and it is perhaps useful at this moment to pause, to see what has been accomplished, and try to foresee what lies ahead. The history of the two best known synthetics, DDT and gammexane runs almost parallel: DDT was discovered as a student’s exercise by Zeidler in Germany in 1874, its insecticidal properties by Muller in Switzerland in 1936 and its applicability to medical problems by Buxton and others during World War II; benzene hexachloride was synthesized by Faraday in 1824, but it was not introduced as an insecticide until 1941— These and other substances became extensively used after the war, and for the first time it became possible to eradicate, often fairly easily, an insect vector of disease, instead of merely to reduce its numbers


Author(s):  
Margaret L. King

Scholars largely neglected the history of the family until after World War II, when they began to employ theoretical perspectives imported from the social sciences. In the 1960s, two principal figures triggered its study: Philippe Ariès, associated with the French Annales school, and Peter Laslett, cofounder at Cambridge University, England, of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Since that period, studies have proliferated on the history of family and household in Europe and its subregions and on the related topics of childhood and youth.


1958 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-199
Author(s):  
J. R. T. Hughes

War is a drain on resources, both of manpower and of materials. The object of government financial policy in time of war is primarily to ease the real drain by making its monetary counterpart work as smoodily as possible. In a long and brilliantly written book R. S. Sayers has provided a meaty account of Britain's financial policy during World War II. Any serious study of the problems of war finance or the financial history of World War II would do well to begin with this volume.


Author(s):  
Andrzej Dębski Andrzej Dębski

The highest level of cinema attendance in Lower Silesia after World War II was recorded in 1957. It was higher than before the war and lower than during the war. In the years that followed it steadily declined, influenced by global processes, especially the popularity of television. This leads us to reflect on the continuity of historical and film processes, and to look at the period from the 1920s to the 1960s as the ‘classical’ period in the history of cinema, when it was the main branch of mass entertainment. The examples of three Lower Silesian cities of different size classes (Wroclaw, Jelenia Gora, Strzelin) show how before World War II the development from ‘the store cinema [or the kintopp] to the cinema palace’ proceeded. Attention is also drawn to the issue of the destruction of cinematic infrastructure and its post-war reconstruction. In 1958 the press commented that ‘if someone produced a map with the towns marked in which cinemas were located, the number would increase as one moved westwards’. This was due to Polish (post-war) and German (pre-war) cinema building. The discussion closes with a description of the Internet Historical Database of Cinemas in Lower Silesia, which collects data on cinemas that once operated or are now operating in the region.


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