From Towns to Sprawling Suburbs

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Industrial Sector ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Shopping Malls ◽  
World War ◽  
Housing Developments ◽  
Farm Population ◽  
Middle West ◽  
Edge Cities

This chapter examines the growth of sprawling suburbs and exurbs around the Middle West's largest cities. Housing developments on the outskirts of Wichita, Omaha, St. Louis, and a few other cities became increasingly common during World War II and in the 1950s as the farm population declined. As the farm population dwindled, people fleeing the region entirely or gravitating to Dallas and Houston (where new jobs were more abundant) became a more likely scenario. The chapter explains how this reshuffling led to the emptying of farms and small towns and also to the rise of new centers of population, not in the cities but adjacent to them. It also considers how edge cities have become an important feature of social life in the Middle West. It shows that edge cities were not only communities of housing developments and shopping malls, but also the location of the region's growing industrial sector.

Montreal in the Twentieth Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 169-209
Author(s):  
Michèle Dagenais
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
Industrial Sector ◽  
Immigrant Communities ◽  
World War ◽  
Quiet Revolution ◽  
Key Industries ◽  
The City

Montreal began the twentieth century as Canada’s primary city, its major port with an emerging industrial sector, ruled by an Anglophone Protestant elite while populated by a Francophone Catholic majority—the two solitudes. Diverse European immigrant communities created a third solitude, producing a city of complex communities. Linguistic and educational segregations drew newcomers to difficult choices. The city juggled its diversity through the depression; World War II and early cold war times brought prosperity. The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 ended Montreal’s primacy; Toronto rose to become Canada’s financial and industrial capital—while the Quiet Revolution for Francophone rights in Quebec propelled Montreal to become a more regional cultural capital. That movement helped Montreal protect key industries while immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Islamic world created new ethnic diversity. Urban processes mixing separations, aggregations, and integrations allowed Montreal to grow through urban sprawl and keep solid prosperity, fair distributions, and open opportunities, limiting marginalities.

scholarly journals Support the Troops: Gulf War Homecomings and a New Politics of Military Celebration

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
David Fitzgerald
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Gulf War ◽  
Persian Gulf War ◽  
World War ◽  
American Military ◽  
New Politics ◽  
Vietnam Era ◽  
The Persian Gulf

The celebrations that took place in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War of 1991 stood out as the largest seen in the United States since the end of World War II, as hundreds of thousands of troops marched in triumphant parades in almost every major American city and in hundreds of small towns. But the pageantry did not simply celebrate American military and technological prowess. Spectators at these parades also engaged in a novel form of patriotism that emphasized unquestioning support for the troops. Representing a crucial moment in the American public's deepening veneration for U.S. soldiers and veterans, the Gulf War celebrations marked a turning point when the Vietnam-era image of the soldier as a broken or rebellious draftee was finally and purposefully eclipsed by the notion of the volunteer service member as hero.

Niemcy w Warszawie po raz pierwszy. Nowsze opracowania na temat niemieckiej okupacji 1915–1918

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1 (464)) ◽  
pp. 129-140
Author(s):  
Maciej Górny
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
World War ◽  
Proper Place ◽  
The Many ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Great War

The article describes the newer works devoted to the occupation of Polish lands, especially of Warsaw during World War I. Recently, this subject, so far neglected, has drown the attention of numerous scientists, both from Poland and from abroad. Their point of view is different not only from the older perspectives, but also from the perspectives of slightly newer works on the other occupied areas and emphasizing the connection between the experience of the Great War and genocide during World War II. In the most precious fragments, the new historiography gives a very wide image of social life, in which the proper place is taken by previously marginalised social groups. Differently from the older works, the policy of the occupants on the Polish lands is not treated only as a unilateral dictate, but rather as a dynamic process of negotiation, in which the strength and position of each of the (many) sides has been changed. And, this change is accompanied by the new arrangements concerning almost all aspects of the German policy and the conditions of living during World War I.

Recovering from the Great Depression

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Dust Storms ◽  
World War ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Middle America ◽  
Middle West ◽  
Smith County

This chapter examines how the Middle West recovered from the ill effects of the Great Depression. The Great Depression was something Americans hoped they would never experience again. In the rural Midwest, foreclosures and sheriff's auctions were common. The worst drought years devastated the land. Dust storms blew with such intensity that crops failed and machinery broke down. World War II sparked the economy, revived agriculture, and coincided with better weather. However, the war took millions of men and women away from their families, necessitated mandatory rationing, and drove up prices. When it was over, rural communities faced continuing challenges. The chapter considers the case of Smith Center, Kansas, to illustrate the challenges rural communities faced as they overcame the setbacks of the Great Depression and prepared for the era ahead. Recovery from the Great Depression varied across middle America, but many of the dynamics evident in Smith County occurred elsewhere.

The Émigré Walt Whitman: Songs of Mourning, 1943–1948

2021 ◽  
pp. 229-239
Author(s):  
Lawrence Kramer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Paul Hindemith ◽  
Collective Trauma ◽  
World War ◽  
Boer War ◽  
Musical Settings ◽  
The Us

Musical settings of Walt Whitman’s poetry were ‘beyond the nation’ from the very beginning. The first of them was composed in 1880 by an Alsatian immigrant to the US, Frédéric Louis Ritter, and until around 1930 the majority of Whitman settings came from German and British composers. The majority of those settings, in turn, dealt with war and its aftermath in mourning. Whitman’s poetry of the American Civil War provided a template for grappling musically with later conflicts, from the Boer War to World War I to World War II. The years 1942 and 1948 saw major war-themed settings from four German and German-émigré composers: Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith in America, and Hans Werner Henze and Karl Amadeus Hartmann in Germany. A common thread among these pieces, exemplified most explicitly in Weill’s setting of ‘Come Up from the Fields, Father’, is the question of whether and how the act of transposed mourning can make the collective trauma of war ‘livable’ – in a sense of the term derived from T. W. Adorno and Judith Butler, for whom ‘livability’ is measured by the power of publicly avowed mourning to integrate trauma into the symbolic systems on which social life depends.

Austausch der wirtschaftlichen Führungskräfte in der SBZ/DDR nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg

2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcel Boldorf
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Major Part ◽  
Industrial Sector ◽  
Political Control ◽  
World War ◽  
Business Elite ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
Party Members ◽  
Soviet Occupation Zone

AbstractAfter World War II, a major part of the business elite managed to flee from the Soviet Occupation zone. Thus, in the period of trusteeship that followed, the volume of personnel changes remained rather low. In April 1948, when the industrial sector was finally nationalised, the SED reinforced personnel changes again. Key positions which dealt with the workforce were taken over by party members, whereas former engineers often succeeded in keeping their positions. Gradually, a widespread system of political control was introduced in order to survey the choice of cadres and to defend the party’s leading role in the economy.

scholarly journals How the Female Subject was Tempered. An Instructive History of 8 March and Its Media Representation in Naša Žena (Our Woman)

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-43
Author(s):  
Paula Petričević
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Female Subject ◽  
Media Representation ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Abstract The author explores the socialist emancipation of women in Montenegro during World War II and its aftermath, using the example of the 8 March celebrations. The social life of this ‘holiday of the struggle of all the women in the world’ speaks powerfully of the strength and fortitude involved in the mobilization of women during the war and during the postwar building of socialist Yugoslavia, as well as the sudden modernization and unprecedented political subjectivation of women. The emancipatory potential of these processes turned out to be limited in the later period of stabilization of Yugoslav state socialism and largely forgotten in the postsocialist period. The author argues that the political subjectivation of women needs to be thought anew, as a process that does not take place in a vacuum or outside of a certain ideological matrix, whether socialist or liberal.

scholarly journals Latin American Popular Art in a Museum: How Things Become Art

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-89
Author(s):  
Olaya Sanfuentes
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Art Museum ◽  
World War ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Popular Art ◽  
The People ◽  
Latin American Culture

In 1943 when Universidad de Chile celebrated its centennial all Latin American nations were invited to participate in the commemorative events. One of the most interesting was the Exhibition of American Popular Art at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes(National Museum of Fine Arts) which brought together the objects from participating countries. The Universidad de Chile´s invitation asked countries to send functional objects that were part of the people´s daily lives. The exhibition was very successful, critically acclaimed, and highly attended. But above all, it planted the seed for what was to become the Museo de Artes Populares Americanas(American Popular Art Museum) functioning to this day.In this essay I would like to highlight a series of contexts, actors and institutions behind the phenomena: specific incarnations of Pan Americanism during the Second World War; the Latin American perspective in general and in particular, the Chilean perspective of the university´s role in society; the new value of Latin American arts since the 20thcentury. These contexts and events are useful to shed light on the “social life” of the objects that were part of the exhibition and they also help us to understand a dynamic definition of art which emerged from the recognition of craft in use as worthy of exhibition in a National Fine Arts Museum and then to remain at the permanent collection of a popular art museum.The radical importance of this essay is that it constitutes an example of a thing which represents not just art but also other values. In a midst of the World War II, Latin American Popular Art represented peace. The objects of the exhibition were seen as incarnations of Latin American cultural identity and historiography has gone on to view Latin American culture as a specific contribution to peace effort.

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