scholarly journals Culture and Customs

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Waterhouse

Sydney’s pre-industrial culture was comprehensive and public, and most European inhabitants participated as players, performers or spectators. After 1850, however, a series of distinct but overlapping cultures emerged, imported and adapted from Europe and America to meet the needs of a modern, class-based city. In this essay I explore the characteristics of the city’s pre-industrial culture, and map its replacement by a set of sometimes conflicting modern, urban cultures. My aim is also to show how new forms of cultural transmission facilitated a process of cultural resolution after World War I even as new forms of culture based on ethnicity, age and gender emerged to produce a different mix of cultural diversity.

Author(s):  
Mischa Honeck

This chapter explores how the BSA globalized the masculine myth of the frontier to combat the rise of a largely peer-regulated, frivolous, and sexualized youth culture in the 1920s. As the propagated “return to normalcy” after World War I had not led to a reinstatement of prewar gender norms but was contradicted by working and voting women as well as men struggling to find proper peacetime masculinities, Scout leaders rediscovered the foreign as a field to discipline youth and mold men. They arranged two spectacular expeditions, one to Africa and the other to Antarctica, which sent four Eagle Scouts abroad in the hope that their age-appropriate and consumer-friendly enactments of a young frontier masculinity would stabilize dominant hierarchies of age and gender. While the official narratives of these expeditions offered reassurance to white elites, the boys’ appropriations of manhood and empire were often idiosyncratic and inconclusive, pointing to the incongruities between adult projection and youthful experience.


Author(s):  
R. J. W. Evans

The formation of Czechoslovakia introduced a remarkable novelty into the heart of the European continent after World War I. It was an unexpected creation and a completely new state, whereas its neighbours as successors to the Habsburg Monarchy either carried historic names and connections (Austria, Hungary, Poland), or were reincarnations of existing sovereign realms (Yugoslavia), or both (Rumania). Moreover, Czechoslovakia seemed uniquely to embody the ideals of the post-war settlement, as a polity with strongly western, democratic, and participatory elements. Yet Czechoslovakia was a historical construct, deeply rooted in earlier developments. It constitutes classic terrain for a study of the ‘nationalist and fascist Europe’ which emerged after 1918. This book deals with the history of Czechoslovakia and discusses Czech nationalism, along with the Czechs' relationship with Slovaks and Germans, Britain's policy towards Czechoslovakia, and gender and citizenship in the first Czechoslovak Republic.


PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1515-1518
Author(s):  
Hülya Adak

Since 2001, I Have Been Teaching Courses in Cultural Studies, European and Turkish Literature, Modern Drama, and Gender and sexuality studies at Sabancı University in Istanbul. During my fifteen years of teaching undergraduate and graduate students, the Armenian genocide was a particularly challenging theme to bring into the classroom. Even at Sabancı University, one of the rare liberal universities in Turkey to offer courses that challenge Turkish national myths, most students, including those who graduated from “liberal” high schools, had received a nationalist education and came to college either not knowing anything about the Armenian genocide or denying it altogether. Denial of the Armenian genocide is still pervasive in Turkey; 1915 is identified in history textbooks as the year of the Battle of Gallipoli, the most important Ottoman victory against the British and French naval forces during World War I. For most of the twentieth century and up until 2005, when the seminal Ottoman Armenians Conference opened a public discussion of the topic, silence regarding the deportation and genocide of the Ottoman Armenians prevailed. If denialist myths in Turkey acknowledge the deaths of the Ottoman Armenians, they justify such deaths as “retaliation” for the deaths of Turkish Muslims during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 or equate the massacres of Armenians with Turkish casualties of war from the same period. For instance, Talat Paşa, the mastermind behind the deportations and massacres of roughly one million Armenians in 1915-16, argues in his memoirs that an equal number of Turks were killed by Armenians during World War I and in its aftermath (51-56).


Author(s):  
Giorgio Mariani

This chapter examines the juxtaposition of war and gender in The Backwash of War, a collection of thirteen short stories by Ellen Newbold La Motte (1873–1961) based on her experience as a volunteer nurse in Belgium at a hospital behind the French lines during World War I. La Motte's stories literally devoted to the wounds of the Great War, as well as the psychological and moral degradation caused by the conflict. Yet La Motte also acknowledges how even her own critiques, no matter how intransigent, are always at risk of feeding back into the machinery of war on both ideological and practical grounds. As a woman, she understood quite well how war discourse strategically exploits the opposition it sets up between the peaceful virtues of womanhood and the warlike instincts of masculinity by constructing the protection of the former as a license for the latter. This chapter also considers the themes of medicine and torture in The Backwash of War.


Also received - Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus, 2001. vi+441 pages, figures, tables. 2001. n.p.: Department of Antiquities of Cyprus; ISSN 0070-2374 hardhack. - Miles Russell (ed.). Digging holes in popular culture: archaeology and science fiction (Bournemouth University School of Conservation Sciences Occasional Paper 7). xvii+174 pages, 39 figures, 1 table. 2002. Oxford: Oxbow; 1-84217-063-5 paperback £18 & US$29. - Martha C. Nussbaum & Juha Sihvola (ed.). The sleep of reason: erotic experience and sexual ethics in ancient Greece & Rome. viii+457 pages. 2002. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 0-226-60915-4 paperback £18.50 & $26. - Laura K. McClure. Sexuality and gender in the Classical wor1d: readings and sources. xiii+318 pages, 9 figures. 2002. Oxford & Malden (MA): Blackwell; 0-631-22588-9 hardback £55 & $62.95,0-631-22589-7 paperback £15.99 & $27.95. - Luciano Floridi. Sextus Empiricus: the transmission and recovery of Pyrrhonism. xvi+150 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables. 2002. New York (NY): Oxford University Press; 0-19-514671-9 hardback £35. - David McKnight. From hunting to drinking: the devastating effects ojalcohol on an Australian Aboriginal community. xiv+239 pages, 1 figure, 21 plates, 2 tables. 2002. London: Routledge; 0-415-27150-9 hardback, 0-415-27151-7 paperback. - Ralph Barker. The Royal Flying Corps in World War I. xx+507 pages, illustrations. 2002. London: Robinson; 1-84119-470-0 paperback £9.99. - Paul Doherty. The godless mun: a mystery of Alexander the Greut. xii+303 pages, 1 map. 2002. London: Constable; 1-84119-496-4 hardback £16.99.

Antiquity ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 76 (293) ◽  
pp. 884-884
Author(s):  
N. James

2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-204
Author(s):  
Robert Blobaum

This article attempts to demonstrate how an entirely unexplored and seemingly unimportant episode, at least to grand historical narratives, can open up multiple lines of inquiry. In the course of my research on everyday life in Warsaw during the First World War, I came across an intriguing phenomenon—one might even call it a movement—of going “barefoot” (boso in Polish) during the last two years of the war. Initiated by students from Warsaw’s institutions of higher education as a means of symbolic protest against collapsed living standards, the barefoot movement would quickly spread to other groups. As it did, it generated a discourse that revealed existing cultural, political, ethnic, social, and gender-based tensions among an urban population made destitute by the exactions of the Great War. Having mined Warsaw’s daily press for any kind of reference to the barefoot movement, I have attempted in these pages to make some sense of this fleeting phenomenon by linking analysis of social and political unrest, metropolitan cultural debates, and the quotidian economic realities of wartime.


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