Introduction

Author(s):  
Alex Goodall

This introductory chapter analyzes how conflicting impulses for loyalty and liberty shaped the politics of countersubversion between World War I and the McCarthy era. By examining the ways this intellectual problem manifested in various historical contexts, the chapter uncovers a history of fits and starts rather than simple, linear progression: waves of growth in political policing followed by undercurrents of reform. The contradictory effort to retain historic freedoms while simultaneously limiting them is what gave American countersubversion its distinctively American character: populist, legalistic, voluble, and partisan. The chapter also seeks to explain how a country with a long-standing hostility to the centralization of power, and a strong disposition to associate activist government with tyranny, gradually reconciled itself to a domestic security state.

Author(s):  
Louis Hyman

This introductory chapter provides a history of debt. While personal lending had always existed, before 1917 it had never been legal to charge interest rates high enough to turn a profit and, equally important, lenders had never been able to resell their consumers' debts or borrow against them. In short, personal debt had never been able to be a normal business. However, personal debt assumed a new role within American capitalism once it became legal, sellable, and profitable. These developments did not occur all at once, but happened over the course of the twentieth century, beginning after World War I, and resulting as much from entrepreneurial innovation as governmental policy. Common to all these shifts were new ways of regulating and reselling debt. Indeed, regulation made legal lending possible, but its relative strength and enforcement propelled lending in some unexpected directions.


Author(s):  
Odile Moreau

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.


Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-120
Author(s):  
Michael Pesek

This article describes the little-known history of military labor and transport during the East African campaign of World War I. Based on sources from German, Belgian, and British archives and publications, it considers the issue of military transport and supply in the thick of war. Traditional histories of World War I tend to be those of battles, but what follows is a history of roads and footpaths. More than a million Africans served as porters for the troops. Many paid with their lives. The organization of military labor was a huge task for the colonial and military bureaucracies for which they were hardly prepared. However, the need to organize military transport eventually initiated a process of modernization of the colonial state in the Belgian Congo and British East Africa. This process was not without backlash or failure. The Germans lost their well-developed military transport infrastructure during the Allied offensive of 1916. The British and Belgians went to war with the question of transport unresolved. They were unable to recruit enough Africans for military labor, a situation made worse by failures in the supplies by porters of food and medical care. One of the main factors that contributed to the success of German forces was the Allies' failure in the “war of legs.”


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura A Talbot ◽  
E Jeffrey Metter ◽  
Heather King

ABSTRACT During World War I, the 1918 influenza pandemic struck the fatigued combat troops serving on the Western Front. Medical treatment options were limited; thus, skilled military nursing care was the primary therapy and the best indicator of patient outcomes. This article examines the military nursing’s role in the care of the soldiers during the 1918 flu pandemic and compares this to the 2019 coronavirus pandemic.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Robert Nemes

Abstract Hungary has a long, rich history of wine production. Historians have emphasized wine's importance to the development of both the Hungarian economy and Hungarian nationalism. This article ties together these historiographical threads through a case study of a small village in one of Hungary's most famous wine regions. Tracing the village's history from the 1860s to World War I, the article makes three main claims. First, it demonstrates that from the start, this remote village belonged to wider networks of trade and exchange that stretched across the surrounding region, state, and continent. Second, it shows that even as Magyar elites celebrated the folk culture and peasant smallholders of this region, they also cheered the introduction of what they saw as scientific, rational agriculture. This leads to the last argument: wine achieved its place in the pantheon of Hungarian culture at a moment when the local communities that had grown up around its production and stirred the national imagination were undergoing dramatic and irreversible change.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 372-396
Author(s):  
Maja Spanu

International Relations scholarship disconnects the history of the so-called expansion of international society from the presence of hierarchies within it. In contrast, this article argues that these developments may in fact be premised on hierarchical arrangements whereby new states are subject to international tutelage as the price of acceptance to international society. It shows that hierarchies within international society are deeply entrenched with the politics of self-determination as international society expands. I substantiate this argument with primary and secondary material on the Minority Treaty provisions imposed on the new states in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe admitted to the League of Nations after World War I. The implications of this claim for International Relations scholarship are twofold. First, my argument contributes to debates on the making of the international system of states by showing that the process of expansion of international society is premised on hierarchy, among and within states. Second, it speaks to the growing body of scholarship on hierarchy in world politics by historicising where hierarchies come from, examining how diverse hierarchies are nested and intersect, and revealing how different actors navigate these hierarchies.


Author(s):  
Brent A. R. Hege

AbstractAs dialectical theology rose to prominence in the years following World War I, the new theologians sought to distance themselves from liberalism in a number of ways, an important one being a rejection of Schleiermacher’s methods and conclusions. In reading the history of Weimar-era theology as it has been written in the twentieth century one would be forgiven for assuming that Schleiermacher found no defenders during this time, as liberal theology quietly faded into the twilight. However, a closer examination of this period reveals a different story. The last generation of liberal theologians consistently appealed to Schleiermacher for support and inspiration, perhaps none more so than Georg Wobbermin, whom B. A. Gerrish has called a “captain of the liberal rearguard.” Wobbermin sought to construct a religio-psychological method on the basis of Schleiermacher’s definition of religion and on his “Copernican turn” toward the subject and resolutely defended such a method against the new dialectical theology long after liberal theology’s supposed demise. A consideration of Wobbermin’s appeals to Schleiermacher in his defense of the liberal program reveals a more complex picture of the state of theology in the Weimar period and of Schleiermacher’s legacy in German Protestant thought.


2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Setran

AbstractIn the years between World War I and World War II in the United States, public and religious educators engaged in an extended struggle to define the appropriate nature of character education for American youth. Within a post-war culture agonizing over the sanctions of moral living in the wake of mass violence and vanishing certitudes, a group of conservative educators sought to shore up traditional values through the construction of morality codes defining the characteristics of the “good American.” At the same time, a group of liberal progressive educators set forth a vigorous critique of these popular character education programs. This article analyzes the nature of this liberal critique by looking at one leading liberal spokesperson, George Albert Coe. Coe taught at Union Theological Seminary and Teachers College, Columbia University, and used his platform in these institutions to forge a model of character education derived from the combined influences of liberal Protestantism and Deweyan progressive education. Coe posited a two-pronged vision for American moral education rooted in the need for both procedural democracy (collaborative moral decision making) and a democratic social order. Utilizing this vision of the “democracy of God,” Coe demonstrated the inadequacies of code-based models, pointing in particular to the anachronism of traditional virtues in a world of social interdependence, the misguided individualism of the virtues, and the indoctrinatory nature of conservative programs. He proposed that youth be allowed to participate in moral experimentation, adopting ideals through scientific testing rather than unthinking allegiance to authoritative commands. Expanding the meaning of morality to include social as well as personal righteousness, he also made character education a vehicle of social justice. In the end, I contend that Coe's democratic model of character education, because of its scientific epistemological hegemony and devaluing of tradition, actually failed to promote a truly democratic character.


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