Frontiers of Visibility

Transfers ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franziska Torma
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Popular Images ◽  
Cinematic Technology

This article deals with the history of underwater film and the role that increased mobility plays in the exploration of nature. Drawing on research on the exploration of the ocean, it analyzes the production of popular images of the sea. The entry of humans into the depths of the oceans in the twentieth century did not revitalize myths of mermaids but rather retold oceanic myths in a modern fashion. Three stages stand out in this evolution of diving mobility. In the 1920s and 1930s, scenes of divers walking under water were the dominant motif. From the 1940s to the 1960s, use of autonomous diving equipment led to a modern incarnation of the “mermen“ myth. From the 1950s to the 1970s, cinematic technology was able to create visions of entire oceanic ecosystems. Underwater films contributed to the period of machine-age exploration in a very particular way: they made virtual voyages of the ocean possible and thus helped to shape the current understanding of the oceans as part of Planet Earth.

scholarly journals What the Progressives Had in Common

2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glen Gendzel
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York University ◽  
Progressive Movement ◽  
Core Theme ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S

When Professor Benjamin Parke De Witt of New York University sat down to write the first history of the progressive movement in 1915, he promised “to give form and definiteness to a movement which is, in the minds of many, confused and chaotic.” Apparently it was a fool's errand, because confusion and chaos continued to plague historians of early twentieth-century reform long after Professor De Witt laid his pen to rest. The maddening variety of reform and reformers in the early twentieth century has perpetually confounded historians' efforts to identify what, if anything, the progressives had in common. Back in the 1950s, Richard Hofstadter charitably allowed that progressives were “of two minds on many issues,” whereas Arthur Link argued that “the progressive movement never really existed” because it pursued so many “contradictory objectives.” In the 1960s, Robert Wiebe concluded that the progressives, if they constituted a movement at all, showed “little regard for consistency.” In the 1970s, Peter Filene wrote an “obituary” for progressivism by reasserting Link's claim that the movement had “never existed” because it was so divided and diffuse. In the 1980s, Daniel Rodgers tried to recast the “ideologically fluid” progressive movement as a pastiche of vaguely related rhetorical styles. By the 1990s, so many competing characterizations of progressivism had emerged that Alan Dawley wondered if “they merely cancel each other out.” In 2002, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore declared emphatically that “historians cannot agree” on progressivism. In 2010, Walter Nugent admitted that “the movement's core theme has been hard to pin down” because progressivism had “many concerns” and “included a wide range of persons and groups.”

Coda

2020 ◽  
pp. 734-743
Author(s):  
Laura U. Marks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Grassroots Politics ◽  
International Solidarity ◽  
Guerrilla Movements ◽  
History Of ◽  
Armed Resistance ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Arabic Speaking

In the twentieth-century Arabic-speaking world, communism animated anticolonial revolutions, workers’ organizations, guerrilla movements, and international solidarity. The communist dream was cut short by Arab governments, deals with global superpowers, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and historical bad luck. But recently a remarkable number of Arab filmmakers have turned their attention to the history of the radical Left. Filmmakers from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco have been urgently seeking models for grassroots politics in the labor movements, communist parties, and secular armed resistance of earlier generations. This coda explores two strata of communist audiovisual praxis: the radical cinema that supported labor movements and guerrilla actions from the 1950s to the 1980s, and recent films that draw on that earlier movement. The coda argues that the Arab audiovisual archive holds flashes of communism that have been neither fulfilled nor entirely extinguished. The new films release their unspent energy into the present, diagnosing earlier failures of Arab communism and making plans for new forms of solidarity.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kendra Taira Field
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Great Migration ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Image Fit ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Back To Africa

“Grandpa went back to Africa with Garvey,” my grandmother recalled. I carried this precious refrain into the archives with me. In Garvey’s place, I found Chief Sam, in the black and Indian borderlands of Oklahoma. While the Great Migration had largely displaced the preceding history of black rural emigration at the nadir, so had Garveyism displaced descendants’ memories of the Chief Sam movement. Meanwhile, scholars portrayed the movement as the product of a single charismatic charlatan and his nameless, faceless followers. Relying almost exclusively on U.S. sources and the memories of those “left behind” in an economically depressed and politically repressed Jim Crow Oklahoma, the only book-length study of the movement, written in the 1950s, argued that the Chief Sam movement illustrated “the desperate hopes of an utterly desperate group of people.” The image fit easily with twentieth-century American tropes of black victimhood and criminality....

The ‘Brazilian Connection’ in the History of American Linguistics

1999 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-382
Author(s):  
Cristina Altman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
South American ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Structural Linguistics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One

Summary When mention is made of Brazil in connection with American linguistics, it usually amounts to a reference to the Linguistic Circle of New York, where Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (b.1908), who had come from Brazil where he had done ethnological work, met and exchanged ideas. This singular event has cast a shadow on other contacts between Brazil and American linguistics, of which, the one between Jakobson and the Brazilian linguist Joaquim Mattoso Câmara (1904–1970) was much more consequential, at least as far as the implementation of structural linguistics in Brazil and in South America generally during the 1950s and the 1960s is concerned. Mattoso Câmara came to the United States and spent most of his time in New York City (September 1943 till April 1944), where he got exposure to Praguean type structuralism, notably through Jakobson’s lectures he attended at Columbia University and at the École Libre of New York, which had been established by European refugees at the time. He also participated in the first meetings of the Linguistic Circle of New York in 1943 as one of its co-founders. Following his return to Rio de Janeiro, Mattoso Câmara proposed, in 1949, as his doctoral thesis a phonemic description of Brazilian Portuguese. The work was published a few years later, in 1953. His most influential work, Princípios de Lingüística Gerai, first published in 1954, had two more revised and updated editions (1958, 1967) and served to introduce several generations of Brazilian as well as other South American students to structural linguistics during the 1950s and 1960s.

Conclusion

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vernon Bogdanor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Intellectual Elites

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the history of the British constitution in the twentieth century. The findings reveal that while there was widespread confidence in the virtues of the constitution at the beginning of the twentieth century, that confidence seemed to have evaporated. This loss of confidence coincided with a collapse of national self-confidence that had begun in the 1960s when British political and intellectual elites began to come to terms with the fact that Great Britain was falling economically behind her continental competitors.

Back to the Future: Modernist Architecture and All That Heaven Allows

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria L. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Colonial Revival ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Living Space ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modernist Architecture ◽  
Domestic Environments ◽  
Cultural Connotations

Since every stage of Ron Kirby and Carey Scott's relationship is marked by alterations in their domestic environments, Chapter 6 ("Back to the Future: Modernist Architecture and All That Heaven Allows") explores some of the conflicting social and cultural connotations that have been encoded into their respective dwellings. For instance, Ron's progressive renovation of the Old Mill recapitulates the history of twentieth-century Modernist architecture in reverse. The final incarnation of this structure evokes Le Corbusier's Machine Age villas of the 1920s rather than Frank Lloyd Wright's more organic mid-century Modernist aesthetic, which dissents from the dominant 1950s American view of the ideal home by suggesting a less materialistic way of life. By contrast, Carey's suburban Colonial Revival residence represents the negation of the freedom from traditional conventions that Ron's living space ultimately implies.

Exoticized Voices, Racialized Bodies

2019 ◽  
pp. 83-112
Author(s):  
Jake Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Cultural Center ◽  
White American ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
American Values ◽  
History Of ◽  
Polynesian Cultural Center ◽  
The 1960S

Just as Mormons used musical theater to purchase whiteness in the early twentieth century, so too do Mormons begin in the 1960s to use musical theater to associate other racial minorities with white American values. By allowing certain groups the opportunity to voice whiteness through the conventions of musical theater, Mormons reimagined the genre as a tool to transform some minority members into exemplars of whiteness. This chapter first details the history of Mormonism in Hawaii and the musical theater productions at the Mormon-owned Polynesian Cultural Center that began there in 1963. Importantly, Mormons have long understood dark-skinned Polynesians, like themselves, to be a chosen people, rather than cursed--displaced Jews, in fact, whose origins are explained in The Book of Mormon. The chapter then analyzes the Mormon musical Life . . . More Sweet than Bitter, billed as a sequel to Fiddler on the Roof, for its narrative explicitly connecting Mormons to Judaism. The musical stage thus becomes for modern Mormons a reckoning device to demonstrate belonging and acceptance in exotic terms--“whitening” the dark-skinned Polynesians and demonstrating fluidity between Mormonism and Judaism.

The Cul-de-Sac of Social Democracy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan M. Wald
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
New York Intellectuals ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Irving Howe ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S

A history of Irving Howe and Dissent magazine is used to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the social democratic alternative that became the Left wing of the New York intellectuals during the 1950s. This is followed by an examination of the life and work of Harvey Swados, which also express the ambiguities that would render this tradition problematic during the era of new radicalization in the 1960s.

scholarly journals Film and the "Other" Singaporean

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edna Lim
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
The Other ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Air Film ◽  
Second Period

COMING UP FOR AIR: FILM AND THE "OTHER" SINGAPOREAN The history of Singapore's film industry is marked by two distinct periods. The first period, which lasted from the 1950s to the 1960s, is considered the golden age of Singapore films due to the prolific outpouring of primarily Malay films produced by the local Cathay and Shaw studios. The second period, which began in the 1990s, constitutes a revival of sorts for Singapore film, and is marked by the recent spate of local productions that began with Medium Rare in 1991 and continues to the present. What is interesting about this current "resurgence" of local films is that while these films have resuscitated the previously dormant film industry in Singapore, and can, therefore, be considered a "revival," they are in fact very different kinds of films from the ones that were made during the golden age, just as the current...

scholarly journals Recommissioning Law Reform

1997 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 831 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roderick A. MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Daily Activities ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
State Legislation ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
Widespread Belief ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Legal Normativity

This article offers a critical analysis of expert Law Reform Commissions in Canada. The author traces the history of the idea of institutional law reform from its intellectual roots early in the twentieth century through its apotheosis in the 1960s and 1970s to its modern decline, which the author attributes to shifting cultural tendencies creating scepticism as to the value of law reform. The author argues for a reconceptualization of expert Law Reform Commissions, and his analysis proceeds in three stages. First, the author examines the concepts of law which are promoted by law reform and concludes that the widespread belief that explicit, official law (state legislation) is the superior juridical form is in fact erroneous. The author argues that formal legislation is not the only form of law, but in fact everyday practices (including non-linguistic ones) also constitute part of legal normativity. Next, the author contends that law reform is not the exclusive domain of the law reform commissioner, but in fact is carried out by judges, lawyers and all citizens every day simply by the performance of their daily activities. Finally, the author argues that in order to maintain their utility Law Reform Commissions must be willing to reimagine themselves. They must be willing to reduce staff and work with external personnel, they must reject narrow instrumentalist processes and focus on issues of broader relevance, and they must conceive of research projects not directly related to doctrinal categories of law and which are intended to create a product digestible by the entire population. The author concludes by arguing that, while there is a future for expert Law Reform Commissions in Canada, they must be willing to recommission themselves with a new focus.

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