Blindness as Empathy: The Politics of Touch in Works by Dan Sterup-Hansen

2020 ◽  
pp. 205-228
Author(s):  
Karen Westphal Eriksen

This article has as its topic the Danish artist Dan Sterup-Hansen (1918–1995) and his paintings and prints on the subject of blind people with canes as well as works related to these. Sterup-Hansen was active as an artist from a young to an old age, but made a significant artistic contribution in the decades following World War II. During this period, he explored a number of themes related to cold war anxiety and the cultural trauma of the World War II. These themes centre on the human body and a phenomenological perception of the world. They are humanitarian in spirit and are related to Sterup-Hansen’s left-wing political views of solidarity, humanism, and advocacy for change and reconstruction after the World War II.

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 65
Author(s):  
Robert E. Alvis

Despite is global popularity in recent decades, the Divine Mercy devotion has received scant scrutiny from scholars. This article examines its historical development and evolving appeal, with an eye toward how this nuances our understanding of Catholic devotions in the “age of Vatican II.” The Divine Mercy first gained popularity during World War II and the early Cold War, an anxious era in which many Catholic devotions flourished. The Holy Office prohibited the active promotion of the Divine Mercy devotion in 1958, owing to a number of theological concerns. While often linked with the decline of Catholic devotional life generally, the Second Vatican Council helped set the stage for the eventual rehabilitation of the Divine Mercy devotion. The 1958 prohibition was finally lifted in 1978, and the Divine Mercy devotion has since gained a massive following around the world, benefiting in particular from the enthusiastic endorsement of Pope John Paul II. The testimonies of devotees reveal how the devotion’s appeal has changed over time. Originally understood as a method for escaping the torments of hell or purgatory, the devotion developed into a miraculous means to preserve life and, more recently, a therapeutic tool for various forms of malaise.


Author(s):  
Melvyn P. Leffler

This chapter considers the end of the Cold War as well as its implications for the September 11 attacks in 2001, roughly a decade after the Cold War ended. While studying the Cold War, the chapter illustrates how memory and values as well as fear and power shaped the behavior of human agents. Throughout that struggle, the divergent lessons of World War II pulsated through policymaking circles in Moscow and Washington. Now, in the aftermath of 9/11, governments around the world drew upon the lessons they had learned from their divergent national experiences as those experiences had become embedded in their respective national memories. For policymakers in Washington, memories of the Cold War and dreams of human freedom tempted the use of excessive power with tragic consequences. Memory, culture, and values played a key role in shaping the evolution of U.S. national security policy.


Author(s):  
Oskar Stanisław Czarnik

The subject of this article is an overview of Polish publishing in the exile during the World War II and first post-war years. The literary activity was mostly linked to the cultural tradition of the Second Polish Republic. The author describes this phenomenon quantitatively and presents the number of books published in the respective years. He also tries to explain which external factors, not only political and military, but also financial and organizational, affected publications of Polish books around the world. The subject of the debate is also geography of the Polish publishing. It is connected with a long term migration of different groups of people living in exile. The author not only points out the areas where Polish editorial activity was just temporary, but also the areas where it was long-lasting. The book output was a great assistance to Polish people living in diasporas, as well as to readers living in Poland. The following text is an excerpt of the book which is currently being prepared by the author. The book is devoted to the history of Polish publishing in exile.


2021 ◽  
Vol 148 (3) ◽  
pp. 535-558
Author(s):  
Remigiusz Kasprzycki

Pacifism and anti-militarism in Western Europe, 1918–1939 As the consequence of the events of 1914–1918, the pacifism was on the rise in Western Europe. Societies of England, France and Germany as well as other Western European countries, set themselves the goal of preventing another war from breaking out. International congresses and conventions were organized. They were attended by peace advocates representing various social and political views, which made cooperation difficult. These meetings did not prevent the Spanish Civil War, the aggression against Abyssinia and the outbreak of World War II. In addition to moderate pacifists, Western Europe was also home to radical anti-militarists who believed that way to the world peace led through the abolition of military service. The pacifists in Britain and France were satisfied with their politicians’ submissiveness and indecision toward Hitler during the 1930s. Pacifism and radical anti-militarism also fitted perfectly into the plans of the Comintern. With its help, the USSR weakened the military potential of Western Europe.


Genealogy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Mark Edwards

Christian nationalism in the United States has neither been singular nor stable. The country has seen several Christian nationalist ventures come and go throughout its history. Historians are currently busy documenting the plurality of Christian nationalisms, understanding them more as deliberate projects rather than as components of a suprahistorical secularization process. This essay joins in that work. Its focus is the World War II and early Cold War era, one of the heydays of Christian nationalist enthusiasm in America—and the one that shaped our ongoing culture wars between “evangelical” conservatives and “godless” liberals. One forgotten and admittedly paradoxical pathway to wartime Christian nationalism was the world ecumenical movement (“ecumenical” here meaning intra-Protestant). Protestant ecumenism curated the transformation of 1920s and 1930s Christian internationalism into wartime Christian Americanism. They involved many political and intellectual elites along the way. In pioneering many of the geopolitical concerns of Cold War evangelicals, ecumenical Protestants aided and abetted the Christian conservative ascendancy that wields power even into the present.


1983 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 660-676 ◽  

Until 1935 the contribution of the Japanese nation to world physics was very limited. A few names of Japanese physicists were familiar—those of Y. Nishina and S. Kikuchi spring to mind—but these men were products of Western training and were known through their publications in Western journals. A decade later, even though World War II had intervened, Japan had become a significant contributor to theoretical physics with an impressive number of first rate research workers publishing in their own periodical Progress of Theoretical Physics , the only journal in the world devoted entirely to the theoretical side of physics. Initially by far the largest volume of Japanese research was on the most modern aspect of the subject: elementary particles and fields.


1972 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Weinstein

‘Ours is an era of “cases”,’ Diana Trilling wrote several years ago, ‘starting with the Sacco-Vanzetti case in the 1920s, proceeding through the Hiss and Oppenheimer cases to the Rosenberg case, the Chessman case, the Eichmann case, and [the subject of Mrs Trilling's essay]…culminating…in the Profumo case.’ We could add several since then, of course, and her chronology is misleading – the Rosenbergs having followed Hiss but preceded Oppenheimer – but Mrs Trilling's point, that such cases and others provoked within their society basic ‘confrontation(s) between opposing social principles’, remains valid. The Hiss, Rosenberg and Oppenheimer episodes were American society's most controversial post-World War II security cases. Each in turn dramatized the political and cultural impact of the Cold War for large numbers of Americans. They serve as useful paradigms, when examined together, for studying the process by which complex problems of evidence are reduced to compelling images of an event. Almost from the moment the ‘facts’ emerged in each case they congealed, first into partisan accounts and then into minor mythologies, in which each case became the subject-matter for a simple morality tale. Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Robert Oppenheimer, and the supporting caste in each drama achieved, in their own time, the status of icons in the demonologies and hagiographies of the opposing camps. Looking recently through the dreary record of trials and hearings connected with security problems during the Truman-Eisenhower era, I found certain continuities in the appraisal by intellectuals and politicians of these three otherwise singular episodes.


2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 36-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leopoldo Nuti

Drawing on newly declassified U.S. and Italian documentation, this article as-sesses U.S. policy toward Italy under the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations and uses this test case to draw some general conclusions about the nature of U.S. -Italian relations during the Cold War. The first part of the article focuses on issues that have been neglected or misinterpreted in the existing literature on the subject, and the second part presents some of the lessons that can be learned from the study of U.S. -Italian relations in the 1950s and 1960s. The aim is to cast broader light on the current debate about the role and influence of the United States in Western Europe after World War II.


2011 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shana Bernstein

Through the lens of the Community Service Organization (CSO), this article explores the emergence of Los Angeles ethno-racial communities' political activism and what enabled their success in a difficult Cold War climate. The CSO's creation in 1947, when it became the first enduring civil rights organization for the largest urban Mexican-origin population in the United States, is striking since historical narratives generally assume the Cold War crushed meaningful civil rights change. The CSO complicates this declensionist narrative. Its success stemmed in part from its reliance upon interracial networks that sustained it in its early years. The CSO reveals links between different racial and ethnic communities, in three different eras—the World War II, Cold War, and civil rights eras—that made the emergence and persistence of such activism possible.


Author(s):  
Daria Mikhailovna Pokrovskaia

The subject of this research is the practice of liberal internationalistic approach to foreign affairs, which form many decades is a defining factors in studying Canada’s foreign policy. The Canadian liberal internationalism emerged after the World War II, and the concept of its ideology received its development in the 1950’s being inextricably linked to the name of Lester Pearson. The object of this research is the views, ideas and main approaches of Lester Pearson, who held a post of Undersecretary of State and later Prime Minister of Canada, towards the formation of foreign policy of the country. Methodology contains the analysis of personal sources of Lester Pearson and his colleagues, public speeches, official documents of Canadian Department of Foreign Policy, as well as writings of the leading Russian and foreign scholars. The author highlights the key principles of the liberal internationalistic approach towards conducting Canada’s foreign policy, among which is the institutional approach, participation of Canada in world politics as a “medium superpower”, mediation in settlement of international disputes, peacekeeping activity and adherence to the ideas of collective security, etc. A detailed analysis is carried out on the personal views and techniques of conducting diplomacy of Lester Pearson that influences the development of the Canadian liberal internationalism.


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