scholarly journals Missionaries and Borderlands: «The Mission Play» and Missionary Practices in Alta California

2021 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
David Melendez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Character ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
California Indians ◽  
Alta California ◽  
Mission History ◽  
The Status ◽  
California Missions ◽  
Moral Dimensions ◽  
Theatrical Representations

This essay takes up a core question of this issue of Pamiętnik Teatralny: how are we to think about historiography beyond a dualism, settled in time and reflective of the status quo? With respect to the California missions, historical treatments of colonization revolve around a dualism shaped by moral dimensions of the missionary enterprise—did the missions help California Indians or harm them? Theatrical representations, like the wildly successful early twentieth century pageant drama, The Mission Play, staged a version of mission history that argued for the former. As a representation of the mission past, the play conflated missions, as institutions, with the moral character of missionaries, thus edifying a fantasy and entrenching the dualism. However, attention to missionary practices, like keeping time using the mission bell, reveal how the missions were sites where indigenous and colonial realities were in constant conflict. Through practices, relations between missionaries and indios produced a space that was neither strictly colonial nor indigenous, and yet both—a borderland. As a mode of spatial dialectics, borderlands thinking can unsettle the duality underlying representations of the mission past to question how that dualism has come into being.

Murder and Maugham: A Neglected Subversive?

2002 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 330-339
Author(s):  
Keith Soothill
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Labour Government ◽  
Serious Crime ◽  
The Status

Somerset Maugham's writings had huge audiences in the first half of the twentieth century. In much of his work the focus is on people behaving badly. What effect did his work have on his readers? This article examines his short stories, of which approximately one-fifth of the major ones have murder as their theme. Focusing on the murders that Maugham ‘creates’, the claim is that Maugham is subversive, challenging some readily made assumptions. In Maugham's scheme of things, the criminal justice system is usually inappropriate, irrelevant or produces injustice, with ‘rough justice’ usually the best that is on offer. The resourceful can get away with murder. Murder is not the most serious crime for many. Instinct rather than rationality is the best judge. Maugham also emphasises the importance of fate, thus implying we are not in control of our destinies. The article argues that popular authors, such as Maugham, may have contributed much more than is generally recognised to the developing unease about the ‘status quo’ that ultimately led to the landslide victory of the Labour government in 1945.

The Boy Brahms

2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-136
Author(s):  
Boman Desai
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Original Story ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

During the late twentieth century, the veracity of a particular aspect of Johannes Brahms's boyhood came under challenge. Had he played the piano in Hamburg's dockside bars as many of his biographers had recorded, or had he not? The two sides of the story were debated in the spring 2001 issue of 19th-Century Music. Jan Swafford, Brahms's definitive biographer in English, provided the case for the status quo, citing all the known instances of times when Brahms himself had mentioned the story to friends and biographers. Styra Avins, a translator of many of Brahms's heretofore untranslated letters into English, provided evidence to the contrary by saying all the friends and biographers were mistaken. Swafford's inventory of sources is complete, but there remained more to be said. In "The Boy Brahms" I have attempted to show how Avins's evidence is strictly circumstantial and speculative. At this remove from the incidents in question it can be nothing more. I have attempted to refute the conclusions she has drawn from the young Brahms's handwriting, the testimony of neighbors, and the laws governing attendance in the bars, among other things. I have also attempted to show inconsistencies in Avins's arguments that throw into question her thesis and support the veracity of the original story.

scholarly journals THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE ISLAH MOVEMENT TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONALISM AND ISLAMIC EDUCATION IN PRE-INDEPENDENT MALAYSIA

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (7) ◽  
pp. 12-23
Author(s):  
Hafiz Zakariya
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Islamic Education ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Malay Peninsula ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Status ◽  
Short And Long Term

The advent of the Islah movement in Malay Peninsula during the early twentieth century challenged the status quo and the existing political and religious institutions. It created a major controversy and tension between the reformists and those supporting the existing order. Consequently, some Muslims were suspicious of the reformists. This was primarily due to their non-adherence to the Shafi’i school of Islamic law, which was adopted by the majority of Muslims not only in Malay Peninsula, but the Nusantara in general. Amid such controversy, some people overlook and even dismiss the contribution of the reformists. Therefore, this article re-examines both the short and long-term contribution of the Islah movement to Malay society.

Neo-Primitivism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Parton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Target Groups ◽  
Russian Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Peter The Great ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Status

Neo-Primitivism is a style-label employed by the Muscovite avant-garde in the early twentieth century to describe forms of visual art and poetry that were tendentiously crude in style and socially and politically contentious in terms of subject matter. In the field of painting, the style was chiefly developed by Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964) and Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) as well as by members of the Donkey’s Tail and Target groups, of which they were the respective leaders. In poetry, Neo-Primitivism was most consistently explored by Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922) and Alexei Kruchenykh (1886–1968), with whom the painters frequently collaborated. Neo-Primitivism was not only oppositional to the polite and refined culture of the status-quo, but it was also intensely nationalistic, seeing itself as the inheritor of indigenous artistic practices that had been erased under the Westernizing reforms of Peter the Great. Whilst initially inspired by Western avant-garde Modernism, the neo-primitives quickly disassociated themselves from Western practices to find inspiration in the soil of Russia. Their aim was to reinvigorate Russian art by reference to the expressive qualities of icon painitng, the lubok (Russian woodcut print), peasant embroidery, the painted tray and signboard, and the ancient Russian fertility statues found in the steppe landscape.

Realism Redux: Staging ‘Billy Budd’ in the Age of Television

2019 ◽  
Vol 100 (3) ◽  
pp. 447-480
Author(s):  
Danielle Ward-Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Performance History ◽  
Television Version ◽  
Billy Budd ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Opera Productions

Abstract Although the term ‘realism’ is frequently deployed in discussing opera productions, its meanings are far from self-evident. Examining four stage and screen productions of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd (1951–66), this article traces how this mode was reworked through television in the mid-twentieth century. Linking theatrical and televisual developments in the UK and the USA, I demonstrate how television’s concerns for intimacy and immediacy guided both the 1951 premiere and the condensed 1952 NBC television version. I then show how challenges to the status quo, particularly the ‘angry young men’ of British theatre and the backlash against naturalism on television, spurred the development of a revamped ‘realistic’ style in the 1964 stage and 1966 BBC productions of Billy Budd. Beyond Billy Budd, this article explores how the meanings of realism changed during the 1950s and 1960s, and how they continue to influence our study of opera performance history.

scholarly journals Markets: Preserving Funeral Markets with Ready-to-Embalm Laws

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 201-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
David E Harrington
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Market Share ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Retail Price ◽  
Funeral Directors ◽  
Funeral Service ◽  
The Status ◽  
Funeral Homes ◽  
The Cost

Thirty-nine states currently have ready-to-embalm laws, which typically require that all firms selling any type of funeral service (even those specializing in cremations) have embalming preparation rooms and all funeral directors be trained as embalmers. Ready-to-embalm laws are designed to preserve the status-quo in funeral markets, thereby protecting currently licensed funeral directors from the ravages of competition. These laws attempt to preserve funeral markets as they existed in the mid-twentieth century, markets that centered on traditional funerals sold by small, full-service funeral homes. The economic chemicals needed to preserve the status quo are harsh, leading to higher funeral prices and often poorer-quality services. The empirical evidence suggests that these laws reduce the cremation rate, the market share of Internet casket retailers, the penetration of national chains, and the number of funeral directors who are immigrants. They also appear to substantially increase the retail price of direct cremations and the cost of traditional funerals. Commissions in several states have recently recommended repealing ready-to-embalm laws, arguing that they are anticompetitive. The evidence presented in this paper should make their recommendations harder to ignore.

Search for Security: The United States and Central America in the Twentieth Century

1991 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Leonard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Central American ◽  
Structural Problems ◽  
Foreign Intervention ◽  
The Status ◽  
Economic Imperialism

The fall of Nicaraguan strongman Anastasio Somoza in July 1979 contributed to the publication of an abundance of literature on United States-Central American relations and, like the literature before it, focused largely upon the crisis at hand. Two historical surveys appeared. Walter LaFeber's Inevitable Revolutions: The United States and Central America represented a revisionist approach, charging that United States economic imperialism is responsible for the present crisis. John Finding's Close Neighbors, Distant Friends: United States-Central American Relations is a straightforward account describing Washington's response to various crisis. Still an analysis of the literature is absent. In an effort to address that issue, this article examines the literature on United States-Central American relations in the twentieth century and concludes that the United States acted on behalf of its own security interests, whether or not the threat of foreign intervention had been real or imagined. In effect, the United States maintained the status quo and failed to deal with the structural problems responsible for the contemporary crisis.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Massimiliano Badino ◽  
Jaume Navarro
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Classical Physics ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Status ◽  
Modern Physics ◽  
Relevant Role ◽  
History Of

This chapter addresses the historiography that justifies the contents of this book along the three major lines: (i) the usual divide between classical physics and modern physics is misleading when trying to explain the status quo of the ether in the early twentieth century; (ii) the ether remains alive in many quarters, thanks to a complex entanglement of authority, knowledge and ethos of some of the main actors involved in this story; (iii) the ether played a relevant role in the quest for unity in knowledge of nature in an attempt to transcend the divide between the material and the spiritual. Finally, this chapter makes a plea for pluralism in the history of science, escaping from linear and progressive accounts in the history of the demise of the ether.

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