scholarly journals The archaeology of Afghanistan revisited

Antiquity ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 94 (376) ◽  
pp. 1084-1087
Author(s):  
J. Eva Meharry

The discipline of archaeology in Afghanistan was at a turning point when the original editions of The archaeology of Afghanistan and the Archaeological gazetteer of Afghanistan were published in 1978 and 1982, respectively. The first three decades of modern archaeological activity in Afghanistan (1920s–1940s) were dominated by French archaeologists who primarily focused on the pre-Islamic past, particularly the Buddhist period. Following the Second World War, however, Afghanistan gradually opened archaeological practice to a more international community. Consequently, the scope of archaeological exploration expanded to include more robust studies of the prehistoric, pre-Islamic and Islamic periods. In the 1960s, the Afghan Institute of Archaeology began conducting its own excavations, and by the late 1970s, national and international excavations were uncovering exciting new discoveries across the country. These archaeological activities largely halted as Afghanistan descended into chaos during the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989) and the Afghan Civil War (1989–2001); the Afghan Institute of Archaeology was the only archaeological institute continuing operations. The original editions of the volumes under review were therefore timely and poignant publications that captured the peak of archaeological activity in twentieth-century Afghanistan and became classic texts on the subject.

Modern Italy ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-84
Author(s):  
Walter Stefano Baroni

This article compares the autobiographical practices used by the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) in the aftermath of the Second World War with those developed by Italian neo-feminism from the late 1960s onwards. The former involved a repeated injunction for activists to write about and express themselves upon joining the party, in what amounted to self-criticism. The latter, meanwhile, took shape as a result of self-consciousness exercises practised by feminist groups in various cities across Italy. The terms of comparison of this article aim to describe what changed and what remained the same in the technologies used to produce the political self within the Italian Left in the twentieth century, beginning from its split in the 1960s. In this context, the paper reveals that the communist and feminist experiences were supported by the same discursive mechanism, which hinged on a paradoxical enunciation of the self. Communist activists and feminists thus faced the same difficulty in political self-expression, which was resolved in two different ways, both equally unsatisfactory. In conclusion, examining the communist autobiographical injunction allows a radical critical reappraisal of the idea that the use of the first person and the political affirmation of subjectivity are determining features exclusively bound to the feminist experience.


2007 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 251-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Borrie

Cluster munitions are a class of weapon originating from the Second World War, and concerns about the hazards they pose to civilians, both at time of use and post-conflict, have been raised since the 1960s. However, attempts to specifically address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions through international legal means gained little traction until a turning-point period from late 2006 to the end of 2007. Remarkably, by the end of this period not one – but two – multilateral negotiating processes were underway to develop international legally binding arrangements on cluster munitions.


1992 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tor Egil Førland

The subject of this article is the foreign policy views of singer and songwriter Bob Dylan: a personality whose footprints during the 1960s were so impressive that a whole generation followed his lead. Today, after thirty years of recording, the number of devoted Dylan disciples is reduced but he is still very much present on the rock scene. His political influence having been considerable, his policy views deserve scrutiny. My thesis is that Dylan'sforeign policyviews are best characterized as “isolationist.’ More specifically: Dylan's foreign policy message is what so-called progressive isolationists from the Midwest would have advocated, had they been transferred into the United States of the 1960s or later. I shall argue that Bob Dylan is just that kind of personified anachronism, seeing the contemporary world through a set of cognitive lenses made in the Midwest before the Second World War – to a large extent even before the First (or, indeed, before the American Civil War).


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-219
Author(s):  
REGINA KUNZEL

Psychoanalysis is at once a system of thought, a toolkit for cultural diagnosis and criticism, and a therapeutic practice. In Dagmar Herzog's exciting new book Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes, psychoanalysis is among the most transformative intellectual events of the twentieth century and is itself transformed by that century's roiling forces, shaping and profoundly shaped by politics and culture. Foregrounding the historicity of psychoanalysis requires Herzog to wrest psychoanalysis from its own claims to historical transcendence. “While psychoanalysis is often taken to be ahistorical in its view of human nature,” Herzog writes, “the opposite is the case” (2). After Freud's death, during the heyday of psychoanalysis in the 1940s and 1950s, through challenges to its authority in the 1960s and 1970s, to what Herzog calls its “second golden age” in the 1980s, the analytic frame offered by psychoanalysis (and the debates it generated) helped people grapple with the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War and offered novel ways of thinking about the most important questions of the postwar decades: about aggression, guilt, trauma, the capacity for violence, indeed about “the very nature of the human self and its motivations” (1).


Author(s):  
Kirsten Leng

The Conclusion accounts for the fate of the women whose ideas are examined in this book, and takes stock of the legacies of their sexological work. It further lays out the benefits of pursuing a larger twentieth century history of women’s sexological work, one that is international in its scope and grapples with the rupture in female sexual knowledge production affected by the Second World War and its geopolitical realignments, the reshuffling of the ideological landscapes after 1945, and the rise of new social movements in the 1960s. Finally, the Conclusion argues that the history of women’s sexological work is especially significant at this particular moment in time, as twenty-first century feminist theorists positively embrace science and nature as intellectual and rhetorical resources once again.


1995 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 227-229 ◽  

In the twentieth century, and particularly under the influence of the Second World War, the international community, in the interests of normal relations, has considered it necessary to agree on certain fundamental principles, such as the observance of universal human rights, the right of nations to self-determination, the equality of the rights of big and small nations, impermissibility of aggression, and liberation from the yoke of colonialism. These principles are written in international conventions, the UN charter and several of its resolutions, and recognized by the majority of states.


2021 ◽  
pp. 57-81
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Telesca

‘The treatment of devaluation as if it were tantamount to hauling down the flag is really very silly’, wrote the Westminster Bank’s economic advisor, R. J. Clark in 1968. Yet, one cannot escape the impression that, on the occasion of the different currency crises that since the gold standard abandonment of 1931 invested the British economy during the twentieth century, the debate went well beyond the decision to produce ‘a change in the price of sterling in terms of other currencies. A technical change made for technical reasons’. The troubles with the pound during the twentieth century, particularly after the Second World War, have attracted the attention of political economists, political, international, and economic historians. Rather than reviving one of the most debated issues in British historiography, this chapter seeks to understand whether the memory of the 1931 abandonment of the gold standard—the ‘mother’ of all currency crises of the twentieth century—played a role on the occasion of other (loosely defined) currency crises. The focus of this chapter is on the 1967 devaluation. In line with this book’s aim to reflect on how and by whom financial crises have been remembered, and what use has been made of the memory of financial crises, this chapter will be looking at the actors remembering and using the events of 1931 in the 1960s, particularly within the Labour party.


Author(s):  
Philippe Vonnard ◽  
Grégory Quin

Resumen: Las repercusiones del aumento del totalitarismo en el período de entreguerras y, más precisamente, de la guerra en sí misma en el deporte internacional, ya han sido objeto de estudios detallados, en particular en torno al Comité Olímpico Internacional (COI), pero el fútbol -y en particular la Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA)- es también un excelente tema de análisis de este "punto de inflexión" en la historia del siglo XX. De hecho, las décadas de 1930 y 1940 fueron décadas clave para comprender los desafíos de la politización del fútbol, para resaltar cómo operaban los líderes deportivos en un contexto ambivalente, pero también para analizar la transformación de la gobernanza de una organización internacional entre los intentos de interferencia impulsados por las potencias del Eje y la "resistencia" orquestada por el secretario general. Así, este artículo pretende cuestionar y analizar la inversión de las potencias del Eje en torno a la FIFA, particularmente a la luz de su actividad continua durante la guerra, utilizando algunos archivos y documentos originales del centro de documentación de la FIFA.Palabras clave: Historia, Segunda Guerra Mundial, Políticas, FIFA, Relaciones Internacionales.Abstract: The repercussions of the rise of totalitarianism in the interwar period and more precisely of the war itself on international sport have already been the subject of detailed studies, particularly around the International Olympic Committee (IOC), but football - and in particular the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) - is also an excellent analyst of this "turning point" in the history of the 20th century. Indeed, the 1930s and 1940s were key decades to understand the challenges of the politicization of football, to highlight how sports leaders operate in an ambivalent context, but also to analyse the transformation of the governance of an international organization between the attempts of interference driven by Axis forces and the "resistance" orchestrated by Secretary General. Thus, this article aims to question and analyse the investment of Axis forces around FIFA, particularly in the light of its continued activity during the war, using some original archives and documents from the FIFA documentation center.Keywords: History, Second World War, Politics, FIFA, International Relations.


Author(s):  
Paul Crosthwaite

This chapter looks at how contemporary British and Irish novelists reflect on the spasms of catastrophic violence that have punctuated the twentieth century and continue to define the twenty-first. These events not only traumatized individuals on a mass scale, but also dealt irrevocable damage to foundational assumptions concerning reason, progress, meaning, and language. Such weighty preoccupations, however, took some time to fully coalesce in the fiction of the post-Second World War period. There were few substantial treatments of the war in its immediate aftermath. When such responses began to appear in the 1950s, and swelled in number in the 1960s, they did so predominantly in the form of conventional social realist narratives concerned with the immediate experience of combat and the impact of the conflict on the structures of British and Irish society.


2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 526-543 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurizio Ghisleni

‘Everyday life’ is a sphere of social relations that has gained increasing attention. The rediscovery of the ‘ordinary’, stimulated by the so-called ‘sociologies of everyday life’ during the 1960s–1990s, has reshaped the subject matter itself of the discipline. This article reviews the intellectual experience represented by the 1960s–1990s sociologies of everyday life. Through comparison with the normative structuralism of Durkheim and Parsons, the most influential sociological version of structuralism in the period immediately after the Second World War, the intention is to pursue two main goals. First, to establish the ‘scientific attitude’ and ‘research program’ developed by such sociologies. Second, to explain why the time has come for the sociologies of everyday life to begin a new phase – in particular given that the present technologization of everyday cultures has changed the order itself of interaction through the advent of a ‘mass knowledge society’.


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