Back to the Future: Eugenics—A Bibliographic Essay

2007 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 163-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID CULLEN

The following essay is a review of the literature about the American eugenics movement produced by scholars over the last fifty years. The essay provides an explanation for today's renewed interest in the subject and for why the science of eugenics remains relevant to contemporary society. The essay examines the catalyst to re-examine the eugenics movement, the influence of Darwinian thought upon its development, the political and institutional support for its growth, the relationship between eugenics, sterilization, and sex, and how the twentieth-century promises of the science of better breeding was a precursor to the twenty-first-century promise of genetic engineering.

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-66
Author(s):  
Christine Adams

The relationship of the French king and royal mistress, complementary but unequal, embodied the Gallic singularity; the royal mistress exercised a civilizing manner and the soft power of women on the king’s behalf. However, both her contemporaries and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians were uncomfortable with the mistress’s political power. Furthermore, paradoxical attitudes about French womanhood have led to analyses of her role that are often contradictory. Royal mistresses have simultaneously been celebrated for their civilizing effect in the realm of culture, chided for their frivolous expenditures on clothing and jewelry, and excoriated for their dangerous meddling in politics. Their increasing visibility in the political realm by the eighteenth century led many to blame Louis XV’s mistresses—along with Queen Marie-Antoinette, who exercised a similar influence over her husband, Louis XVI—for the degradation and eventual fall of the monarchy. This article reexamines the historiography of the royal mistress.


1974 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 5-7

During the past forty years the dominant preoccupation of scholars writing on Livy has been the relationship between the historian and the emperor Augustus, and its effects on the Ab Urbe Condita. Tacitus’ testimony that the two were on friendly terms, and Suetonius’ revelation that Livy found time to encourage the historical studies of the future emperor Claudius, appeared to have ominous overtones to scholars writing against the political backcloth of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Though the subject had not been wholly ignored previously, the success of the German cultural propaganda-machine stimulated a spate of approving or critical treatments. While some were hailing Livy as the historian whose work signalled and glorified the new order, others following a similar interpretation were markedly scathing.


2021 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  

In the midst of dangerous circumstances and events and the thorny relations between Syria and Lebanon ,the issue of Syrian – Lebanese economic relations 1958 – 2000 came to confirm the depth of the relationship between the two counties and indicate the political tensions and the shadows it casts on economic relations. Perhaps the Syrian – Lebanese relations are among the strangest relations that exist between two countries or Even between two peoples , although it brings together a lot of special circumstances that are difficult to find in other countries , any event , even if it is fleeting , can be exploited in a way that harms the essence of the relationship in which interests may intersect between two ordinary countries that do not have any connection of historical weight or A specific geography , the Syrian – Lebanese relationship is , by virtue of history , concurrent with the emergence of the two states as political entities . This reason and others prompted me to choose this topic , which embodies the volume of trade and economic exchange between the two countries and clearly embodies the repercussions of the relationship , which passes from one period to another in a state of ebb and flow . This study sheds light on the economic relations between the two countries , although it is difficult to ignore the impact of the political conditions on them , as they are the main engine , and the decline in economic relations is only a reaction to the crisis policy in many cases . in writing this research , the researcher used the descriptive method of history , and he used an important number of sources that enriched the subject , such as the Lebanese – Syrian relations of the authors Antoine AL-Nashef and Khalil AL-Hindi , as well as the Lebanese – Syrian relations1985 -1943 issued by the Lebanese Documentation and Research Center and last but not least l hope this study will be successful in terms of providing information and facts to the lraqi offices and contributing to their enrichment and providing assistance to the lraqi researcher .


Author(s):  
Thomas Barfield

This chapter looks at the first decade of the twenty-first century in Afghanistan. As the twentieth century ended, ever-larger numbers of Afghans had become caught up in political and military struggles from which they had been previously isolated. Whether as fighters, refugees, or just victims of war and disorder, few escaped the turmoil that roiled the country. Ethnic and regional groups in Afghanistan had become politically and militarily empowered, reversing the process of centralization that had been imposed by Amir Abdur Rahman. Yet when the international community set about creating the new Afghan constitution, it did not start afresh but attempted to restore the institutions of old. This brought to the surface long-simmering disputes about the relationship of the national government to local communities, the legitimacy of governments and rulers, and the relationship that Afghanistan should have with the outside world.


2020 ◽  
pp. 79-96
Author(s):  
Leila Brännström

In recent years the Sweden Democrats have championed a clarification of the identity of the ‘the people’ in the Instrument of government. The reference, they argue, should be to the ethnic group of Swedes. This chapter will take this ambition to fix the subject of popular sovereignty as the point of departure for discussing some of the ways in which the contemporary anti-foreigner political forces of Northern and Western Europe imagine ‘the people’ and identify their allies and enemies within and beyond state borders. To set the stage for this exploration the chapter will start by looking at Carl Schmitt’s ideas about political friendship, and more specifically the way he imagines the relationship between ‘us’ in a political and constitutional sense and ‘the people’ in national and ethnoracial terms. The choice to begin with Schmitt is not arbitrary. His thoughts about the nature of the political association have found their way into the discourse of many radical right-wing parties of Western and Northern Europe.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Evershed

This chapter explores shifting and often contradictory dynamics which have manifested themselves in the relationship between Scottish Conservatism and Ulster Unionism. It provides a brief historical overview of this relationship which, it argues, has been highly salient in the consolidation of Conservatism as a political force in Scotland during the twentieth century, but which has become more ambiguous as understandings of ‘Union’, processes of secularisation, patterns of integration and differentiation, as well as the nature of centre-periphery relations in Northern Ireland and Scotland have increasingly diverged. The chapter also looks at how this relationship has continued to be reshaped into the twenty-first century by a potent mix of political forces which has included the Irish peace process, the Scottish independence referendum and Brexit.


Author(s):  
Laura Robson

This chapter introduces the main question of the book: how did mass violence come to be a primary—perhaps the primary—mode of making political claims in the twentieth and twenty-first century Middle East? It asks when mass violence became a constitutive aspect of the political landscape of the region, why it took precedence over other strategies of state building and establishing political authority, and how governments, armies, and civilians alike came to think of mass violence as a viable and legitimate mode of claiming political space and national rights. Drawing on several different and largely separate historiographies, this introduction argues, makes it possible to produce a synthetic account of violence in the twentieth century Eastern Mediterranean that takes account of regional developments as much as individual national histories.


2020 ◽  
pp. 83-105
Author(s):  
Tom O’Malley

This chapter examines aspects of the relationship between newspapers and their readers in the twentieth century. It explores the ways the newspaper industry understood its readers and how readers responded to newspapers. It discusses patterns of circulation; the effect of industry research on the content of newspapers; the demographics of readership; what readers read, and the nature of their engagement and the question of the effects of the content. It argues that if historians are to grasp the roles newspapers played in the political, cultural and social world of the twentieth century, we need to pay far more attention to their readers.  


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Abeillé ◽  
Elodie Winckel

AbstractDont has been claimed to be an exception to the ‘subject island’ constraint (Tellier, 1991; Sportiche and Bellier, 1989; Heck, 2009) and to contrast with true relative pronouns such as de qui. We provide corpus data from a literary corpus (Frantext), which show that relativizing out of the subject is possible with dont and de qui in French relative clauses, and is even the most frequent use of both relative clauses. We show that it is not a recent innovation by comparing subcorpora from the beginning of the twentieth century and from the beginning of the twenty-first century. We also show, with an acceptability judgement task, that extraction out of the subject with de qui is well accepted. Why has this possibility been overlooked? We suggest that it may be because de qui relatives in general are less frequent than dont relatives (about 60 times less in our corpus). Turning to de qui interrogatives, we show that extraction out of the subject is not attested, and propose an explanation of the contrast with relative clauses. We conclude that in this respect, French does not seem to differ from other Romance languages.


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