scholarly journals The Ultimate Fox in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes

2018 ◽  
Vol 214 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-142
Author(s):  
Instructor Marwa Ghazi Mohammed

         Lillian Hellman was an American playwright whose name was associated with the moral values of the early twentieth century. Her plays were remarkable for the moral themes that dealt with the evil. They were distinguished, as well, for the depiction of characters who are still alive in the American drama for their vivid personalities, effective roles and realistic portrayal. This paper studies Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes as a criticism of the American society in the early twentieth-century. Though America was a country built on hopes and dreams of freedom and happiness. During the Great Depression, happiness was certainly not present in many people's lives. The presence of alternate political ideas, decay of love and values increased life's problems, and considered a stress inducing factor were popular themes to be explored during the Great Depression. America, the land of promises, became an empty world revolving around money and material well-being and which turned the people bereft of love, and human values. Hellman’s play presents the real fox, represented by the political and material world, as the one responsible for the raise of new kind of people, the little foxes, and the decline of human value.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
Quentin Lippmann

This paper studies the evolution of mate preferences throughout the twentieth century in France. I digitized all the matrimonial ads published in France’s best-selling monthly magazine from 1928 to 1994. Using dictionary-based methods, I show that mate preferences were mostly stable during the Great Depression, WWII, and the ensuing economic boom. These preferences started transforming in the late 1960s when economic criteria were progressively replaced by personality criteria. The timing coincides with profound family and demographic changes in French society. These findings suggest that, in the search for a long-term partner, non-material needs have replaced material ones.


2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-97
Author(s):  
Mimasha Pandit

A new image was engendered in twentieth-century Bengal. The image clarified the direction of public opinion, whether it sanctified the actions of the colonizers or that of the colonized. In the process, those who chose to side with the colonized developed a close bond with the others who became a part of the camaraderie. The resultant image, envisioned by the people, did not come to them naturally; it was produced in their mind. The word of the age, printed and performed, helped produce this vision using the context as an index of reference. Words were transmitted and circulated among large number of people, who came to know, discuss and debate it. Despite the strict vigilance of the Raj that censured objectionable words, it nevertheless reached the public. Words found expression in ephemeral media that made the words disseminated untraceable. One such medium was the placard. This article analyses the placards circulated and posted, during the early twentieth century, and delves deep into the process of demonstration and persuasion adopted by the placards to invoke an image of nation among the Bengalis.


Author(s):  
Pamela Radcliff

In the turbulent interwar period, the political ‘Left’ was one of the most visible protagonists, with historians continuing to disagree about the role it played in shaping the outcome of the political struggles. Embedded in strong ‘moral narratives’ about the ‘rise of fascism’, the ‘crisis of democracy’, and the nature of the Bolshevik Revolution, the political Left has been vilified or lionized. For the period from the mid-1920s until 1939, both supporters and detractors agree that the Left was on the defensive, internally divided and weakened by the Great Depression and subject to repression by the state, whether democratic, authoritarian, or Stalinist. This chapter argues that the failure narrative should not subsume the vibrant experimentation and rich and contradictory diversity of the Left experience. A portrait emerges of the interwar Left that wrestled with inevitably imperfect and varied solutions to the ‘problem of community life’ in twentieth-century mass society.


2019 ◽  
pp. 153-210
Author(s):  
Susan T. Falck

This chapter recounts the early years of the Natchez Pilgrimage, a heritage tourism enterprise created by the Natchez Garden Club at the height of the Great Depression. The Pilgrimage dramatized a mix of decades-old southern racial ideology and white historical memory that was repackaged for 1930s consumption. Pilgrimage founder Katherine Miller and other leading clubwomen defined their community’s cultural image, while also redefining the meaning of traditional southern womanhood. The Pilgrimage is also the story of how one southern community’s selective expression of historical memory captivated white tourists eager to immerse themselves in the world of the Old South so vividly portrayed by popular writers and entertainers of the 1930s. The widespread appeal of the Pilgrimage home tours and pageant suggests the power of popular culture to shape a tenacious historical memory that remained in force for much of the twentieth century and lingers even today.


2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-23
Author(s):  
Dan Bäcklund ◽  
Kristina Lilja

Adolescents’ income contributions to working-class families decreased between the 1910s and the 1930s in Sweden. This was significant for adolescents’ right to self-determination. By using household budget surveys, this article shows that at the time of the Great Depression, working adolescents paid less at home than had been common at the beginning of the twentieth century. Youth unemployment is one explanation, although it was also a consequence of children keeping more of their earnings for themselves. This development led to rising costs for having children and is interpreted as an aspect of the trade-off between quantity and quality of children.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Radiah Othman ◽  
Rashid Ameer

Purpose This paper aims to provide a historical understanding of the unemployment context experienced by the New Zealand population during the Great Depression, which might have caused people to commit financial crimes, such as fraud, to survive. Design/methodology/approach The main source of information is narratives from newspaper articles published by 42 newspapers from 1931 to 1950 that explore New Zealanders’ experiences during declined economic conditions. Findings During the period studied, New Zealanders suffered because of various challenges, mainly unemployment. The government’s response was criticised by the people who used the newspapers as a medium to unleash their frustration about the fairness of unemployment relief for the unemployed and taxation of those who were employed. Some people who struggled in between jobs, as well as some who found themselves being disadvantaged, turned to deviant behaviour such as fraud. The fraudsters might be thought of as the victims of the day, committing a crime of survival, not a crime of choice. Research limitations/implications This research promotes more historical studies to enrich fraud-auditing literature. The lack of detailed information reported in the newspapers during this period limits making specific links to individual circumstances. Originality/value Fraudsters have always been perceived as responsible for their destinies, but a wider social and political context is rarely examined in fraud cases. The period chosen for this paper represents the extreme condition in which the elements of motive, opportunity and rationalisation are all interwoven into one.


2014 ◽  
Vol 150 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-40
Author(s):  
Peter Coleman

State censorship in Australia has been rare, controversial and short-lived. There was almost none in the liberal nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the two world wars, the Great Depression and the new age of terrorism led to more determined, if comparatively temporary, attempts to censor publications that advocated sedition or violence. Moral censorship of obscenity was also rare in the nineteenth century, but enjoyed an ‘heroic’ period following the arrival of a new realism in literature and the age of lurid comic books. The internet has made such censorship almost totally ineffective. Blaspheming the Christian religion is no longer treated as a punishable offence, although attacking Islam may still sometimes be deemed actionable in law. The advent of multiculturalism has encouraged legislation to restrict free speech deemed to be ‘hate speech’, but its application has been episodic, unpopular and ineffective. The contest between writers demanding freedom and censors demanding standards is unending. But at the moment, the balance favours writers.


2020 ◽  
Vol 114 (4) ◽  
pp. 1195-1212
Author(s):  
SCOTT F. ABRAMSON ◽  
SERGIO MONTERO

We develop and estimate a model of learning that accounts for the observed correlation between economic development and democracy and for the clustering of democratization events. In our model, countries’ own and neighbors’ past experiences shape elites’ beliefs about the effects of democracy on economic growth and their likelihood of retaining power. These beliefs influence the choice to transition into or out of democracy. We show that learning is crucial to explaining observed transitions since the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, our model predicts reversals to authoritarianism if the world experienced a growth shock the size of the Great Depression.


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