The historical continuum of Jerusalem: the inseparability of time and space, past and present, history and politics

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-120
Author(s):  
Farda Muharram Asadov
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Religious Doctrine ◽  
Sacred Objects ◽  
Holy Places ◽  
History Of ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
The City

Over the long centuries and nowadays the historical concept and political status of Jerusalem remain the most acute problem of relations between the peoples and states of the Middle East, Arabs and Jews, Israel and the Arab Palestinian state. The poignancy of the problem, the arguments of the opposing sides, are mainly rooted in conflicting interpretations of the history of Jerusalem and its holy places. The article presents a view of the history of Jerusalem as a process that began before the formation of the historical consciousness of the Arabs and Jews but used to continuously influence its shaping during the struggle for the city between powerful political forces standing behind the claims of various congregations. The article examines the written evidence of the shrines of Jerusalem that existed before the construction of the First Temple; selected archaeological data are used for additional verification of written sources. Recent proposals for a solution to the political status of Jerusalem are placed in the context of ideas about its cultural and historical significance.  Particular attention is paid to the importance of Jerusalem in the history of the formation of religious doctrine and ritualism in Islam; a distinctive opinion is substantiated by the author concerning the reasons of the initial orientation of the Muslim prayer ritual towards Jerusalem; the existence of perceptions of the shrines of Jerusalem as sacred objects, recognized in the religious and ritual traditions of the Semitic peoples – the ancestors of Jews and Arabs – is established. On the ground of research findings the inseparability of history, culture, spatial limits and political status of the city of Jerusalem as an organic whole and a system is argued, the breach of the balance of which is claimed to inevitably destroy the integrity of the characteristics of Jerusalem in the history of the region, various peoples and all of humanity. The search for a solution to the Jerusalem problem is seen as interaction and the development of a model that recognizes and balances three factors of influence: 1) ideas about the importance of Jerusalem in the national historical narrative of Arabs and Jews; 2) the concept that asserted the consideration of the beginning of the cultural history of Jerusalem as a common Middle Eastern religious centre; and 3) the range of various political solutions proposed for the settlement of the problems of disputed territories in international relations with the assumption of the feasibility of fundamentally new models of solution.

Emotional Cities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Ben Prestel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Capital Flows ◽  
Urban History ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Loss Of Control ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
Dynamic Transformation ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Between 1860 and 1910, Berlin and Cairo went through a period of dynamic transformation. During this period, a growing number of contemporaries in both places made corresponding arguments about how urban change affected city dwellers’ emotions. In newspaper articles, scientific treatises, and pamphlets, shifting practices, such as nighttime leisure, were depicted as affecting feelings like love and disgust. Looking at the ways in which different urban dwellers, from psychologists to revelers, framed recent changes in terms of emotions, this book reveals the striking parallels between the histories of Berlin and Cairo. In both cities, various authors associated changes in the city with such phenomena as a loss of control over feelings or the need for a reform of emotions. The parallels in these arguments belie the assumed dissimilarity between European and Middle Eastern cities during the nineteenth century. Drawing on similar debates about emotions in Berlin and Cairo, the book provides a new argument about the regional compartmentalization of urban history. It highlights how the circulation of scientific knowledge, the expansion of empires, and global capital flows led to similarities in the pasts of these two cities. By combining urban history and the history of emotions, this book proposes an innovative perspective on the emergence of different, yet comparable cities at the end of the nineteenth century.

Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Machado
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Social ◽  
Traditional Elite ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.

Puccini's La Bohème

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
La Boheme ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Many ◽  
The City

La bohème is one of the most frequently performed operas in the world. But how did it come to be so adored? Drawing on an extremely broad range of sources, Alexandra Wilson traces the opera’s rise to global fame. Although the work has been subjected to many hostile critiques, it swiftly achieved popular success through stage performances, recordings, and filmed versions. Wilson demonstrates how La bohème acquired even greater cultural influence as its music and dramatic themes began to be incorporated into pop songs, film soundtracks, musicals, and more. In this cultural history of Puccini’s opera, Wilson offers a fresh reading of a familiar work. La bohème was strikingly modern for the 1890s, she argues, in its approach to musical and dramatic realism and in flouting many of the conventions of the Italian operatic tradition. Considering the work within the context of the aesthetic, social, and political debates of its time, Wilson explores Puccini’s treatment of themes including gender, poverty, and nostalgia. She pays particular attention to La bohème’s representation of Paris, arguing that the opera was not only influenced by romantic mythologies surrounding the city but also helped shape them. Wilson concludes with a consideration of the many and varied approaches directors have taken to the staging of Puccini’s opera, including some that have reinvented the opera for a new age. This book is essential reading for anyone who has seen La bohème and wants to know more about its music, drama, and cultural contexts.

Urban Formalism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Faflik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
The West ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Street Protest ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Form ◽  
The City

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.

Cuba Through A New Lens

2008 ◽  
Vol 81 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 265-270
Author(s):  
Jean Stubbs
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Cuban Revolution ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

[First paragraph]The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered. Samuel Farber. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. x + 212 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)Cuba: A New History. Ric hard Gott . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. xii + 384 pp. (Paper US$ 17.00)Havana: The Making of Cuban Culture. Antoni Kapcia. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005. xx + 236 pp. (Paper US$ 24.95) Richard Gott, Antoni Kapcia, and Samuel Farber each approach Cuba through a new lens. Gott does so by providing a broad-sweep history of Cuba, which is epic in scope, attaches importance to social as much as political and economic history, and blends scholarship with flair. Kapcia homes in on Havana as the locus for Cuban culture, whereby cultural history becomes the trope for exploring not only the city but also Cuban national identity. Farber revisits his own and others’ interpretations of the origins of the Cuban Revolution.

URBAN FOOTBALL PERFORMANCES: PLAYING FOR THE NEIGHBOURHOOD IN SENEGAL, 1950s–2000s

Africa ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susann Baller
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban Youth ◽  
Social Space ◽  
National Football League ◽  
Local Level ◽  
The State ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

ABSTRACTIn Senegal, neighbourhood football teams are more popular than teams in the national football league. The so-called navétanes teams were first created in the 1950s. Since the early 1970s, they have competed in local, regional and national neighbourhood championships. This article considers the history of these clubs and their championships by focusing on the city of Dakar and its fast-growing suburbs, Pikine and Guédiawaye. Research on the navétanes allows an exploration of the social and cultural history of the neighbourhoods from the actor-centred perspective of urban youth. The history of the navétanes reflects the complex interrelations between young people, the city and the state. The performative act of football – on and beyond the pitch, by players, fans and organizers – constitutes the neighbourhood as a social space in a context where the state fails to provide sufficient infrastructure and is often contested. The navétanes clubs and championships demonstrate how young people have experienced and imagined their neighbourhoods in different local-level ways, while at the same time interconnecting them with other social spaces, such as the ‘city’, the ‘nation’ and ‘the world’.

The Use of Ottoman Sharīʿa Court Records As a Source for Middle Eastern Social History: A Reappraisal

1998 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dror Ze'Evi
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Geographical Area ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Large Geographical Area ◽  
History Of

AbstractSharīʿa court records are among the most important sources available for the social, economic and cultural history of the Ottoman empire and its provinces, especially from the sixteenth century onwards. These records contain invaluable material on diverse subjects such as economic consumption, agrarian relations, personal status, social stratification, crime and local politics. While covering a large geographical area and spanning several centuries, these records are often regarded by researchers as a single, homogeneous source and treated as a simple account of facts.In this essay, I argue that Sharīʿa court records are a complex source and that researchers should be cautious about accepting the information they contain at face-value. From their questionable statistical representation of society to their biased representation of Islamic law and order, these records defy categorization as simple reflections of reality. Comparisons between different geographical areas and time periods — and to fieldwork carried out in contemporary Sharīʿa courts, demonstrate the potential distance between the records and the reality they purportedly convey.

scholarly journals Mogontiacum: czynniki rozwoju

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leszek Mrozewicz
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Military Base ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Real City

The history of Mogontiacum spans the period from 17/16 BCE to the end of the fourth century CE. It was a strong military base (with two legions stationed there in the first century) and a major settlement centre, though without municipal rights. However, the demographic and economic development, as well as the superior administrative and political status enabled Mogontiacum to transform – in socio-economic and urbanistic terms – into a real city. This process was crowned in the latter half of the third century with the construction of the city walls.

Vienna

2019 ◽  
pp. 76-116
Author(s):  
Andrew Thacker
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cultural Spaces ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The City

This chapter explores the cultural history of Vienna as a story of modernity, space, and power, from the late nineteenth century construction of the Ringstrasse to the postwar building of Red Vienna. It traces the city’s particular version of the geographical emotions of modernism, concentrating upon how the city’s architectural spaces helped shape an ‘inward turn’ in the mood or stimmung (Heidegger) of the modernism produced here, often producing notions of spatial phobias. It also analyses the importance of coffee houses as cultural spaces, and the ‘outsider’ figure of Jewish writers and thinkers in the city. After discussion of key Viennese figures such as Sigmund Freud and Robert Musil, it then traces how Anglophone visitors such as John Lehmann, Naomi Mitchison (in her Vienna Diary), Jean Rhys, and Stephen Spender (in his neglected long poem Vienna) represented the mood of the city in the interwar years. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Carol Reed’s 1949 film The Third Man.

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