Suburban Environment. East Naples Historical Transformations and Sustainability

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 338-367
Author(s):  
Valerio Caruso

This article retraces the late modern and contemporary history of East Naples through its environmental transformations. By the end of the eighteenth century, this marshy rural/suburban area hosted small urban agglomerations and many proto-industrial activities, deeply intertwined with agricultural production. During the nineteenth century, the area experienced its deepest transformations as a result of the three parallel processes of drainage, urbanisation and industrialisation. On the threshold of the twentieth century, East Naples became an industrial suburb, home to an uncontrollable residential sprawl interspersed with factories. This inchoate suburban mix has determined the area's unsustainability, leading to those hygienic deficits, environmental risks and economic and social complications that have plagued it to this day.

2018 ◽  
pp. 1128-1136
Author(s):  
Olga V. Bershadskaya ◽  

The article studies features of socio-economic and socio-political development of the Black Sea village in 1920s. Documents from the fond of the Black Sea District Committee (Obkom) of the RCP (b) -VKP (b) stored in the Center for Documentation of the Modern History of the Krasnodar Krai allow not only to reconstruct the developments in the Black Sea village in the NEP days, but also to understand the nature of its evolution. Uniqueness of the Black Sea village was greatly determined by its geographical environment. There had formed a sectoral makeup of agricultural production: fruit-farming, viticulture, tobacco growing. Rugged relief forced peasants to form holdings or farms; therefore rural communities were rare. Its another distinctive feature was its motley national composition. Over 50 ethnic groups inhabited the district, among most numerous were the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Armenians, and the Greeks. In the first years of the NEP, the main tasks facing district authorities were to develop ‘high-intensity’ industries and to shape local peasant farms into food base for cities and resorts. While tackling these tasks, they had to deal with shortages of land and poor communications and to bring lease relations and work-hands employment up to scratch. The situation was complicated by socio-political inertia of rural population of the district that came from the absence of community tradition. Study of the documents from the fond of the Black Sea party obkom shows that local authorities were well aware of the peculiarity of their region, but in most cases had to follow guidelines set ‘from above’ to introduce all-Russian standards.


2021 ◽  
pp. 31-50
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore

‘The history of political thought and Marxism’ focuses on Marxism, which became the most global and scientific philosophy in the twentieth century. An important figure here is Karl Marx, the outcast from Prussian Trier that famously contributed to the science of historical materialism. Marx’s The Condition of the Working Class in England justified revolution through a philosophy that emerged from reading European history. Marx, along with Friedrich Engels, accepted that the progress of commerce by the end of the eighteenth century made European states more powerful than others in history. Marx’s contemporaries believed that the study of societies in every stage of history is vital in understanding the future.


Author(s):  
Stephen Menn ◽  
Justin E. H. Smith

The life of Anton Wilhelm Amo is summarized, with close attention to the archival documents that establish key moments in his biography. Next the history of Amo’s reception is considered, from the first summaries of his work in German periodicals during his lifetime, through his legacy in African nationalist thought in the twentieth century. Then the political and intellectual context at Halle is addressed, considering the likely influence on Amo’s work of Halle Pietism, of the local currents of medical philosophy as represented by Friedrich Hoffmann, and of legal thought as represented by Christian Thomasius. The legacy of major early modern philosophers, such as René Descartes and G. W. Leibniz, is also considered, in the aim of understanding how Amo himself might have understood them and how they might have shaped his work. Next a detailed analysis of the conventions of academic dissertations and disputations in early eighteenth-century Germany is provided, in order to better understand how these conventions give shape to Amo’s published works. Finally, ancient and modern debates on action and passion and on sensation are investigated, providing key context for the summary of the principal arguments of Amo’s two treatises, which are summarized in the final section of the introduction.


2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-518
Author(s):  
Bianca Gaudenzi ◽  
Astrid Swenson

Introducing the Journal of Contemporary History Special Issue ‘The Restitution of Looted Art in the 20th Century’, this article proposes a framework for writing the history of looting and restitution in transnational and global perspective. By comparing and contextualizing instances of looting and restitution in different geographical and temporal contexts, it aims to overcome existing historiographical fragmentations and move past the overwhelming focus on the specificities of Nazi looting through an extended timeframe that inserts the Second World War into a longer perspective from the nineteenth century up to present day restitution practices. Particular emphasis is put on the interlinked histories of denazification and decolonization. Problematizing existing analytical, chronological and geographical frameworks, the article suggests how a combination of comparative, entangled and global history approaches can open up promising new avenues of research. It draws out similarities, differences and connections between processes of looting and restitution in order to discuss the extent to which looting and restitution were shaped by – and shaped – changing global networks.


1993 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 469-483 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludmilla Jordanova

The production of big pictures is arguably the most significant sign of the intellectual maturity of a field. It suggests both that the field's broad contours, refined over several generations of scholarship, enjoy the approval of practitioners, and that audiences exist with an interest in or need for overviews. The situation is somewhat more complicated in the history of science, since the existence of big historical pictures precedes that of a well-defined scholarly field by about two centuries. Broadly conceived histories of science and medicine were being written in the eighteenth century, when such an all-encompassing vision was central to the claims about the progress of knowledge upon which Enlightenment ideologues set such store. The Plato to Nato style histories, characteristic of the earlier twentieth century, were written largely by isolated pioneers, and while these were used in teaching as the field was becoming professionalized, recent scholars have preferred to concentrate on a monographic style of research. Despite the existence of the series started by Wiley, and now published by Cambridge University Press, it is only in the last ten years or so that more conscious attempts have been made to generate a big-picture literature informed by new scholarship. It is noteworthy that most of this is addressed to students and general readers, although there is no logical reason why it should not tackle major theoretical issues of concern to scholars. My point about maturity still holds, then, since as a designated discipline the history of science is rather new; it is still feeling out its relationship with cognate disciplines. Big-picture histories have an important role to play in these explorations since they make findings and ideas widely available and thereby offer material through which ambitious interpretations can be debated, modified and transformed.


2010 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 95-139
Author(s):  
Matthew Hiscock

My epigraphs offer a stark contrast in their basic assumptions about the place of classical allusion in eighteenth century writing. The second, published only last year in a series devoted to classical reception, implies that allusion – whether conscious or unconscious – is always ‘significant’; the first, fifteen years old and from the first number of the International Journal of the Classical Tradition, suggests that it is largely incidental and superficial. To be fair to Kennedy, the passage quoted above comes from an abbreviated history of classicism from the Hellenistic period to the twentieth century which could not be expected to offer a nuanced account of the nature of classical allusion in the various periods it discusses; but the basic question remains: is classical allusion in the eighteenth century ornamental or essential?


2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 574-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan-Werner Müller

The first part of this essay examines the peculiar role European intellectual history played in coming to terms with the twentieth century as an ‘Age of Extremes’ and the different weight it was given for that task at different times and in different national contexts up to the 1970s. The second part looks at the contemporary history of politically focused intellectual history — and the possible impact of the latter on the writing of contemporary history in general: it will be asked how the three great innovative movements in the history of political thought which emerged in the last fifty years have related to the practice of contemporary history: the German school of conceptual history, the ‘Cambridge School’, and the ‘linguistic turn’. The third part focuses on recent trends to understand processes of liberalization — as opposed to the older search for causes of political extremism. It is also in the third part that the so far rather Euro-centric perspective is left behind, as attempts to create an intellectual history of the more or less new enemies of the West are examined. Finally, the author pleads for a contemporary intellectual history that seeks novel ways of understanding the twentieth century and the ‘newest history’ since 1989 by combining tools from conceptual history and the Cambridge School.


2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Clinton De Menezes

This research aims to critically investigate the changing colonial and post-colonial attitudes towards the South African landscape, as physical space and its representation, through a post-colonial and Post-Modern critique. Chapter One explores the shifting colonial attitudes toward the landscape from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, to provide an historical overview and context for contemporary practice. Section One defines colonialism for the purposes of this study and provides a brief history of colonialism in South Africa. Section Two provides a concise history of European visual representation from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century in order to contextualize the development of South African landscape painting. Section Three analyzes and evaluates changing colonial attitudes and their representation through a discussion of the work of Francois Le Vaillant (1753-1842), Thomas Baines (1820-1875) and J.H. Pierneef (1886-1957). Chapter Two explores attitudes towards the South African landscape between 1948 and 1994 in order to provide a link between colonial representation and post-colonial contemporary practice.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Pasquale Orchard

<p>As a young singer, it is inevitable that one is bombarded with the history of singing. ​Not only are we asked to listen to vocalists of previous ages, but we are also encouraged to analyse their methods and scrutinise their seminal performances in order to better identify the strengths of each singer​. Curious about the extent to which the lauded seventeenth and eighteenth-century ​bel canto vocal techniques hold relevance to contemporary classical singing and newer compositions, my research focused on whether these well-tried techniques are transferable. While the application of ​bel canto principles to the ​bel canto repertoire are clearly pertinent, my investigation concentrated on the feasibility and applicability of transferring these vocal techniques to modern repertoire, specifically songs and arias written in English, my mother tongue. This exegesis details my exploration of the application of such techniques to these two different sets of repertoire, and aims to shed light on the experience of the process of applying the ​bel canto ​principles to such works, and the potential benefits afforded by the practice of them.</p>


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