Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Corsino
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Italian Population ◽  
World War ◽  
Present Volume ◽  
Personal Community ◽  
Group Characteristics

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the emergence of the Italian Mafia in one particular setting. It examines a long-standing organizational component of the Chicago Outfit—namely, the Chicago Heights boys. It looks at the Chicago Heights operation from its beginning in the early 1900s to the heyday of Outfit activities in the post-World War II era. Along the way, the book attempts to unravel the mix of social and cultural discriminations against Italians in the early part of the last century, the consequential group characteristics that emerged within the local Italian population, and the appropriation of these characteristics as social capital resources in the collective pursuit of social mobility. The remainder of the chapter discusses the personal, community, and public contexts of the present volume, followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.

In Search of a Father

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus J. Arnold ◽  
Eve M. Duffy
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
General Question ◽  
World War ◽  
Adolf Hitler ◽  
The Third ◽  
Personal Level ◽  
The Third Reich

In this introductory chapter, the author narrates how he searched for his missing father, Konrad Jarausch, who had died in the USSR in January 1942. After providing a background on Jarausch's nationalism and involvement in Protestant pedagogy, the chapter discusses his experiences during World War II. It then explains how Jarausch grew increasingly critical of the Nazis after witnessing the mass deaths of Russian prisoners of war. It also considers how the author, and his family, tried to keep the memory of his father alive. The author concludes by reflecting on his father's troubled legacy and how his search for his father poses the general question of complicity with Nazism and the Third Reich on a more personal level, asking why a decent and educated Protestant would follow Adolf Hitler and support the war until he himself, his family, and the country were swallowed up by it.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret A. Simons
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Nazi Occupation ◽  
French Resistance

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Simone de Beauvoir's post-World War II political engagement. The key to Beauvoir's post-World War II political engagement is, of course, her experience of the war itself—an experience recounted in her Wartime Diary (2009) and in The Blood of Others (1945), a novel set in the French Resistance and written during the Nazi Occupation. Although Beauvoir escaped the worst horrors of the war—on the front lines or in the concentration camps—she lost friends murdered by the Nazis and found her own life profoundly changed. Indeed, the Occupation that began in June 1940 confronted her with the realization that freedom, which she had assumed to be a metaphysical given, was contingent upon an economic and political situation that she had previously ignored.

History's “Illegibles”: National Indeterminacy in Istria

2012 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 116-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Ballinger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Italian Population ◽  
World War ◽  
Demographic Shifts ◽  
Number Of Individuals ◽  
Modern Era

In the 1990s, the Julian (Giulian) Region that includes the cities of Trieste and Gorizia and the Istrian peninsula attracted the renewed attention of scholars for its qualities as a space in which both cosmopolitanism and nationalist polarization had flourished in the late Habsburg era. Although a healthy debate exists as to the degree to which forms of interethnic tolerance remain a feature of everyday life in these areas, most historians agree that this region underwent a series of increasing nationalizations (Italian, Slovene, Croatian, and Yugoslav) that began in the nineteenth century and culminated in the partisan anti-Fascist uprising and massive demographic shifts after World War II, as the majority of Istria's “Italian” population (together with a significant number of individuals self-identifying as Slovene or Croat) migrated from the territory that passed from Italian to Yugoslav control. The historiography of the modern era in the Julian Region has thus confirmed many of the assumptions made by nationalist activists along this classic “language frontier” about the inevitability, exclusivity, and irreversibility of ethnonational identifications.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Van Buskirk
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Biographical Sketch ◽  
World War ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
English Speaking World

This introductory chapter begins with a review of the works of Lydia Ginzburg. Ginzburg came of age soon after the Revolutions of 1917 as the most talented student of the Russian Formalists. For seven decades, she wrote about the reality of daily life and historical change in Soviet Russia. Yet in the English-speaking world, she is still known primarily as a literary scholar and as a “memoirist” of the siege of Leningrad during World War II. The chapter then sets out the book's focus, namely to investigate Ginzburg's concept of the self in the wake of the crisis of invidualism: a self that is called “post-individualist.” An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented followed by a biographical sketch of Ginzburg.

Modernism in Translation

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Robyn Creswell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Arab World ◽  
World War ◽  
Arabic Word

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. The book explores the Arab modernist movement, the most significant literary grouping in the Arab world since World War II. It produced a body of work remarkable for its aesthetic ambition and rhetorical coherence. Like many artistic groups of the early and mid-twentieth century, the Arab modernists, gathered around a magazine that acted as the nerve center of their movement: Shi'r [Poetry], a quarterly dedicated to poetry and poetry criticism, founded in 1957 by Yusuf al-Khal. The Shi'r poets' conceptualization of “modernity” or “modernism”—the Arabic word, al-hadatha, can be used for both English terms—was immensely influential.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik S. Gellman ◽  
Jarod Roll
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
The United States ◽  
Southern History ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Depression Era

This introductory chapter tells the story of how two preachers challenged racial divisions in the United States. Southern history, even American history generally, is too often told in white stories and black stories that seldom connect; yet the chapter asserts that the intertwined stories of Owen Whitfield and Claude Claude Williams challenges students of the history of the southern working class to take seriously the dynamic power and centrality of religious ideas in social and political movements, which raises new questions about the assumptions scholars have made about race, respectability, politics, and even gender in the Depression and World War II era. Their careers, in part, tell the story of the recovery of a southern common ground strong enough to support a working-class social movement for greater democracy in Depression-era America.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Doody
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Urban Center ◽  
World War ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The New Deal

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to explore the beginnings of post-World War II popular conservatism, particularly the glue that held this disparate movement together: anti-Communism. Building upon recent scholarship on conservatism, the book brings their insights to bear on the debate on the nature of early Cold War domestic politics. It argues that the key elements of twentieth-century conservatism—antipathy toward big government, embrace of religious traditionalism, celebration of laissez-faire capitalism, and militant anti-Communism—arose during the 1940s and 1950s out of opposition to the legacy of the New Deal and its modernizing, centralizing, and secularizing ethos. The book examines a specific urban center, Detroit, and grounds its conception of politics in the daily decisions of a wide variety of individuals rather than on the actions of political elites.

Introduction

Arthur Szyk ◽  
2004 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Joseph P. Ansell
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
Artistic Life ◽  
Entire World ◽  
The Individual

This introductory chapter briefly describes the life and work of the artist, Arthur Szyk. It discusses his numerous and diverse works and places special emphasis on those works which contain topical commentary on contemporary political and social issues. Though it would seem difficult to reconcile these greatly disparate elements in one artist's work, the chapter argues that the concentrated political activity of the World War II years was not an aberration — however important — in Szyk's career. It was an integral part of an artistic life dedicated to serving humanity through his talents. To understand the interconnection of all aspects of his work, and to understand the man who was equally adept at rendering an entire world within a few square inches of exquisite beauty and savagely attacking a political enemy through caricature, the chapter argues that one must look beneath the decorated surface of the page to the meaning of the individual work and to its historical context.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Simon Peplow
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Collective Violence ◽  
World War ◽  
Perceived Importance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
Black Britons

This introductory chapter introduces the main themes of the book, which locate the anti-police collective violence that spread throughout England in 1980–1 within a longer struggle against racism and disadvantage faced by black Britons that had seen a growth in more militant forms of resistance since World War II. This chapter provides introductory overviews of the existing literature related to race and immigration, collective violence, spread of disorder, and the disturbance of 1980–1 themselves. The history of public inquiries is briefly examined, demonstrating their perceived importance within the British legal system and initiating discussion of why they have proven controversial. The chapter ends with a note on the work’s use of a number of key terms, and a brief overview of the book’s structure.

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