Introduction

Author(s):  
Timothy Stanley ◽  
Jonathan Bell

This introductory chapter considers the challenges, setbacks, and accomplishments of American liberal reformers in the twentieth century. Covering themes such as gender, class, labor, race, urban development, and underlying ideology, ten experts in their given fields have identified ways in which liberal politics has helped shape the nation's political landscape over the last half century. American political history cannot be labeled uniformly as conservative or liberal. Rather, there are conservative moments and liberal moments. Throughout them, reform is possible if given the right leadership and political context. Particular attention is given to the importance of grassroots coalition efforts to the functioning of “high politics” and policy making.

Author(s):  
Gregory Wood

This introductory chapter explores the intertwined histories of smoking and the working class, pointing out the ubiquity of smoking in twentieth-century workplaces despite its marginalized presence in histories of labor. Moreover, the chapter shows that, as cigarette smoking and subsequent nicotine addiction became significant components of many working-class lives in the twentieth century, smokers in a multitude of workplaces shaped, established, and defended the work cultures that sustained their need to use nicotine regularly during the workday. These developments at times accommodated or challenged employers' rules that limited or even banned working-class smoking practices outright. Worker demands for the right to smoke, and their abilities to cultivate spaces and times (sometimes clandestinely) for smoking, underpinned a new dimension of shop floor politics in the cigarette century.


2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 452-489 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn A. Nicholas

Abstract:Recognizing public education as a public good, policymakers have focused on providing those with direct interest in public schools opportunities to influence educational policy making. In the nineteenth century, this often meant providing women the right to vote on and to hold public school offices. Frequently conflated, suffrage and public office holding are actually two different, yet related, citizenship rights. Using state and territorial legislative records as a starting place, this article redefines the understanding of school suffrage by complicating the traditional narrative relative to its relationship with full woman suffrage. In doing so, it also provides evidence that before 1900 women were granted the right to hold public education offices, ultimately being elected in forty-three of forty-eight states before the twentieth century, thus broadening the understanding of women’s political agency prior to attaining full suffrage.


Author(s):  
Volker R. Berghahn

This introductory chapter briefly reviews the lives of the three journalists under discussion—Marion Countess Dönhoff, Paul Sethe, and Hans Zehrer—and places them within the context of German history under the shadow of World War II. It shows that the three journalists were all anti-Nazis in the Weimar Republic who had been enjoying liberal press freedoms under Article 118 of the Constitution. According to this article, “every German” had “the right, within the limits of general laws, to express his opinions freely.” Their freedom became threatened when from 1930 onward they witnessed the rise of Nazism and then Adolf Hitler's seizure of power in January 1933. Sethe, Zehrer, and Dönhoff (though she was not yet a journalist) continued to keep their distance from the regime thereafter. Unlike millions of other Germans, they never became members of the Nazi Party, nor did they emigrate or join the early underground resistance. Instead, this chapter argues that these three journalists went into “inner emigration.”


Author(s):  
Mónica Pachón ◽  
Santiago E. Lacouture

Mónica Pachón and Santiago E. Lacouture examine the case of Colombia and show that women’s representation has been low and remains low in most arenas of representation and across national and subnational levels of government. The authors identify institutions and the highly personalized Colombian political context as the primary reasons for this. Despite the fact that Colombia was an electoral democracy through almost all of the twentieth century, it was one of the last countries in the region to grant women political rights. Still, even given women’s small numbers, they do bring women’s issues to the political arena. Pachón and Lacoutre show that women are more likely to sponsor bills on women-focused topics, which may ultimately lead to greater substantive representation of women in Colombia.


Author(s):  
James Whitehead

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.


1962 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 430-439
Author(s):  
José M. Sánchez

Few subjects in recent history have lent themselves to such heated polemical writing and debate as that concerning the Spanish Church and its relationship to the abortive Spanish revolution of 1931–1939. Throughout this tragic era and especially during the Civil War, it was commonplace to find the Church labelled as reactionary, completely and unalterably opposed to progress, and out of touch with the political realities of the twentieth century.1 In the minds of many whose views were colored by the highly partisan reports of events in Spain during the nineteen thirties, the Church has been pictured as an integral member of the Unholy Triumvirate— Bishops, Landlords, and enerals—which has always conspired to impede Spanish progress. Recent historical scholarship has begun to dispel some of the notions about the right-wing groups,2 but there has been little research on the role of the clergy. Even more important, there has been little understanding of the Church's response to the radical revolutionary movements in Spain.


Fascism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Griffin

In the entry on ‘Fascism’ published in 1932 in the Enciclopedia Italiana, Benito Mussolini made a prediction. There were, he claimed, good reasons to think that the twentieth century would be a century of ‘authority’, the ‘right’: a fascist century (un secolo fascista). However, after 1945 the many attempts by fascists to perpetuate the dreams of the 1930s have come to naught. Whatever impact they have had at a local level, and however profound the delusion that fascists form a world-wide community of like-minded ultranationalists and racists revolutionaries on the brink of ‘breaking through’, as a factor in the shaping of the modern world, their fascism is clearly a spent force. But history is a kaleidoscope of perspectives that dynamically shift as major new developments force us to rewrite the narrative we impose on it. What if we take Mussolini’s secolo to mean not the twentieth century, but the ‘hundred years since the foundation of Fascism’? Then the story we are telling ourselves changes radically.


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