scholarly journals Buchach – a city at the meeting point of different national narratives

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 11-29
Author(s):  
Alois Woldan ◽  

Our article presents three different historic narratives of the city of Buchach in former Eastern Galicia, a Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian one, according to the city’s mixed population, consisting of a larger Jewish, a smaller Polish and a still smaller Ukrainian group. The Polish historic narrative is represented by Sadok Barącz’s book “Pamiątki buczackie”, the Ukrainian one by the Historical and Memoiristical Collection “The City of Buchach and its Region”, compiled by emigration writers, and the Jewish narrative by Y.S. Agnon’s “A City in its Fulness”. These sources provide different ways of presenting history, sometimes converging and sometimes diverging from each other, which is illustrated by the depiction of selected historic events: the siege of the city by Chmelnicki’s troops in 1648, the role of the city in the Polish-Turkish war of 1672, the importance of Austrian rule since 1772 for the city, and the city’s fate in the time of World War I and immediately after the war. Our comparison of the above three historic narratives ends with the re-evaluation of the figure of Mikołaj Potocki, Polish nobleman, who today is held in high esteem by Ukrainian historians of art because of his function as a founder of the most beautiful buildings in Buchach and a sponsor of famous artists, creators of these architectural monuments. He is seen as a mediator between the Polish and Ukrainian tradition.

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
O. W. Saarinen

Kapuskasing, Ontario warrants special mention in the history of Canadian land use planning. The town first acquired special prominence immediately following World War I when it was the site of the first provincially-planned resource community in Canada. The early layout of the settlement reflected the imprints of both the "city beautiful" and "garden city" movements. After 1958, the resource community then became the focus for an important experiment in urban "fringe" rehabilitation at Brunetville, a suburban area situated just east of the planned Kapuskasing townsite. The author suggests that the role of the Brunetville experiment in helping to change the focus of urban renewal in Canada from redevelopment to rehabilitation has not been fully appreciated.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-152
Author(s):  
André Brett ◽  

Historians are becoming alert to the large role of railways in environmental history. To date, many studies in Australasia focus on a specific industry, such as timber. It is now worth turning to the distinctive local or regional effects of railways beyond a single industry or commodity, so to better understand the links between technology, environment, and place. Illawarra presents a valuable case study. The environmental history of the first decades of rail transport exposes how Wollongong and its region industrialised and the ways in which this process affected everything from primary producers to the sounds of daily life. This article takes in the 1850s through to the start of World War I (WWI), a period when rail transport grew from being the adjunct of a few coal mines into an essential common carrier. It progresses through a series of themes that show the economic, social, and cultural attributes that shaped and were shaped by the railway environment. It begins with the railway as a carrier: the extent to which trains fulfilled their intended role to transport Illawarra’s natural resources to Sydney and other markets. It then moves on to the railway as a consumer, putting the local environment to work for its benefit and requiring materials made from resources of distant lands. Railways did more than carry or consume resources; they created their own environment and provided new perspectives on nature. Trains brought people closer to nature, carried them into new—and dangerous—environments in tunnels, and transformed the sonic landscape. Rail travel differed significantly to horseback or sea voyages in capacity and speed, and by WWI it was enmeshed in Illawarra’s environment.


Author(s):  
Karen Ahlquist

This chapter charts how canonic repertories evolved in very different forms in New York City during the nineteenth century. The unstable succession of entrepreneurial touring troupes that visited the city adapted both repertory and individual pieces to the audience’s taste, from which there emerged a major theater, the Metropolitan Opera, offering a mix of German, Italian, and French works. The stable repertory in place there by 1910 resembles to a considerable extent that performed in the same theater today. Indeed, all of the twenty-five operas most often performed between 1883 and 2015 at the Metropolitan Opera were written before World War I. The repertory may seem haphazard in its diversity, but that very condition proved to be its strength in the long term. This chapter is paired with Benjamin Walton’s “Canons of real and imagined opera: Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1810–1860.”


Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-165
Author(s):  
Patrick Hodgson

AbstractThis article provides a synopsis of the spread of epidemic influenza throughout Queensland in 1919–20.1 Statewide the story was, to a greater or lesser extent, the same – regardless of occupation or whether one was from the city or the bush, on the coast or in the far west, no one was immune; even being 300 kilometres from the nearest epicentre of the outbreak was no guarantee of safety. An examination of the state’s newspapers, particularly the Brisbane Courier, makes it evident that outbreaks of influenza erupted almost simultaneously throughout the state. Aided and abetted by Queensland’s network of railways and coastal shipping, together with the crowding of people at country shows, race meetings and celebrations of the formal conclusion of World War I, the disease was swiftly diffused throughout the state. This article hopes to give the reader a sense of how the sheer scale and urgency of the crisis at times overwhelmed authorities and communities.


1986 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-337
Author(s):  
Jacob H. Dorn

Historians have produced a rich and sophisticated literature on urban reform in the progressive era before the First World War. It includes numerous studies of individual cities, biographies of urban leaders, and analyses of particular movements and organizations. This literature illuminates important variations among reformers and their achievements, the relationships between urban growth and reform, and the functional role of the old-style political machines against which progressives battled. Similarly, there are many examinations of progressive-era reformers' ideas about and attitudes toward the burgeoning industrial cities that had come into being with disquieting rapidity during their own lifetimes. Some of these works go well beyond the controversial conclusions of Morton and Lucia White in The Intellectual Versus the City (1964) to find more complex—and sometimes more positive—assessments of the new urban civilization.


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-310
Author(s):  
Borut Klabjan

This article is part of the special section titled From the Iron Curtain to the Schengen Area, guest edited by Wolfgang Mueller and Libora Oates-Indruchová. This article discusses local cultures of remembrance of Yugoslav partisans fallen during World War II in Trieste, now part of Italy, and investigates the role of memory activists in managing vernacular memory over time. The author analyses the interplay between memory and the production of space, something which has been neglected in other studies of memory formation. On the basis of local newspaper articles, archival material, and oral interviews, the essay examines the ideological imprint on the local cultural landscape, contributing to a more complex understanding of memory engagement. The focus is on grassroots initiatives rather than state-sponsored heritage projects. This article argues that memory initiatives are not solely the outcome of national narratives and top–down ideological impositions. It shows that official narratives have to negotiate with vernacular forms of memory engagement in the production of a local mnemonic landscape.


2021 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-568
Author(s):  
Johann Strauss

This article examines the functions and the significance of picture postcards during World War I, with particular reference to the war in the Ottoman Lands and the Balkans, or involving the Turkish Army in Galicia. After the principal types of Kriegspostkarten – sentimental, humorous, propaganda, and artistic postcards (Künstlerpostkarten) – have been presented, the different theatres of war (Balkans, Galicia, Middle East) and their characteristic features as they are reflected on postcards are dealt with. The piece also includes aspects such as the influence of Orientalism, the problem of fake views, and the significance and the impact of photographic postcards, portraits, and photo cards. The role of postcards in book illustrations is demonstrated using a typical example (F. C. Endres, Die Türkei (1916)). The specific features of a collection of postcards left by a German soldier who served in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq during World War I will be presented at the end of this article.


Author(s):  
Alexander Naumov

This article reviews the role of Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 in escalation of crisis trends of the Versailles system. Leaning on the British Russian archival documents, which recently became available for the researchers, the author analyzes the reasons and consequences of conclusion of this agreement between the key European democratic power and Nazi Reich. Emphasis is placed on analyzing the moods within the political elite of the United Kingdom. It is proven that the agreement became a significant milestone in escalation of crisis trends in the Versailles model of international relations. It played a substantial role in establishment of the British appeasement policy with regards to revanchist powers in the interbellum; policy that objectively led to disintegration of the created in 1919 systemic mechanism, and thus, the beginning of the World War II. The novelty of this work is substantiated by articulation of the problem. This article is first within the Russian and foreign historiography to analyze execution of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement based on the previously unavailable archival materials. The conclusion is made that this agreement played a crucial role in the process of disintegration of interbellum system of international relations. Having officially sanctioned the violation of the articles of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 by Germany, Great Britain psychologically reconciled to the potential revenge of Germany, which found reflection in the infamous appeasement policy. This launched the mechanism for disruption of status quo that was established after the World War I in Europe. This resulted in collapse of the architecture of international security in the key region of the world, rapid deterioration of relations between the countries, and a new world conflict.


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