Military Jubilees on the Borderline between the 20th and 21st Centuries: Conteporary Tendencies in the Theory and Practice of the Memorial Culture

Epohi ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Zemtsov ◽  

The article based on materials from military anniversaries of the late XX – early XXI centuries reveals the main trends in the politics of memory in relation to the history of wars of the XIX–XX centuries against the backdrop of digitalization of the information space. The 50th anniversary of the end of World War II (1995) and the events related to the 80th anniversary of the beginning of this war (2019), as well as the 250th anniversary of the birth of Napoleon (2019) are taken as milestone events. As a result of the study, the author identified two trends. Firstly, a trend of a transnational and transcultural nature, focused mainly on general humanistic values. Secondly, the tendency towards a nationally-oriented and politically biased policy, which became prevailing from 2004-2005. The second trend has become characteristic, first of all, for most countries of the post-Soviet space, including the countries of Central and Southeast Europe and Russia. Judging by the fact that a number of Asian countries (primarily China and Japan) have come to the forefront of anniversary events related to World War II, the tendency to decisively revise the transnational and transcultural vectors in the politics of memory in these countries has also become dominant. Western countries also, regardless of attempts to maintain a commitment to tolerance and transnationalism, were caught up in “memory wars” and, as a rule, in connection with the events of military history. The activation of the “memory wars” is largely associated with fundamental changes in the information environment, primarily in connection with the processes of its digitalization. The author believes that the prevalence of the second trend was predetermined by the end of the modernist revolution, which by the end of the twentieth century ended as the dominant world process that determined main parameters of the historical process in the second half of the twentieth century. The consequence of this from the turn of the century has been an increase in the fragmentation of the world and an explosion of thirst for identity. In this regard, historical memory and its twin-antipode, historical politics, have become the main tools (and often creators) of this identity - national, state, religious, ethnic, group and any other form of identity.

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-24
Author(s):  
Mihail Martynov

The article attempts to explain the problems faced by modern Russian politics of memory in connection with falsifications of the history of World War II. Attention is drawn to the reasons for the spread in the public mind of the opinion of the equal responsibility of Germany and the USSR in starting a war. It is shown that the reason for the difficulties of the Russian symbolic policy is the lack of a coherent theoretical construct that allows a logically consistent interpretation of the events of the political history of the first half of the twentieth century. It points to the uncritical acceptance by the Russian political science of the theory of totalitarianism and insufficient attention to the laws of the formation of fascist regimes in Western Europe. It is concluded that inclusion in the world economic system under the conditions of the A historical and comparative approach, comparing the features of using various conceptual foundations of events at the beginning of World War II, depending on the interests and goals of political actors. West inevitably turns out to be supplemented by the loss of sovereignty in the scientific and theoretical sphere.


Mahjong ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Annelise Heinz

The Introduction provides an orientation to the book and its key questions: What did it mean to become “modern” in the early twentieth century? How did American ethnicities take shape in the years leading up to and after World War II? How did middle-class women experience and shape their changing roles in society, before the social revolutions of the late twentieth century? How are these things related? The Introduction also covers an overview of mahjong’s trajectory in the United States. It examines background related to the history of leisure, gender, and consumerism in addition to introducing key sources and methodologies. The introduction sets up the book to tell the story of mahjong’s role in the creation of identifiably ethnic communities, women’s access to respectable leisure, and how Americans used ideas of China to understand themselves.


2005 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-80
Author(s):  
Kay Saunders

In 2001 I was invited to give a public lecture at the Centre for the Study of the History of the Twentieth Century, a scholarly research institute within the University of Paris. The invitation was extended by Professor Stephane Dufoix, who writes on the internment of enemy aliens in World War II, one of my academic specialisations. However, I was not asked to speak about this area of expertise. Indeed, it turned out to be a ‘Don't mention the war’ event. Rather, Professor Dufoix and his colleagues were fascinated by Pauline Hanson and were interested in an Australian perspective on the rise of extreme right-wing populism and the Down Under equivalent of the French les laissés-pour-compte (‘those left behind’) or les paumés (‘the losers’).


1991 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 35-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Loewenberg

Karl Renner's political life encompasses the history of Austria's empire and her two twentieth-century republics, making him the foremost leader of Austrian democratic politics. Renner was also the most innovative theoretician on the nationalities question which plagued the Habsburg monarchy and the twentieth-century world. He was chancellor of Austria's first republic, leader of the right-wing Social Democrats, and president of the post-World War II Second Republic. A study of his life and politics offers a perspective on the origins of the moderate, adaptive, political personality and on the tension between ideology and accommodation to the point where it is difficult to determine what core of principle remained.


Author(s):  
Eileen H. Tamura

As a leading dissident in the World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans, Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara stands out as an icon of Japanese American resistance. In this biography, Kurihara's life provides a window into the history of Japanese Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Hawaiʻi to Japanese parents who immigrated to work on the sugar plantations, Kurihara was transformed by the forced removal and incarceration of ethnic Japanese during World War II. As an inmate at Manzanar in California, Kurihara became one of the leaders of a dissident group within the camp and was implicated in “the Manzanar incident,” a serious civil disturbance that erupted on December 6, 1942. In 1945, after three years and seven months of incarceration, he renounced his U.S. citizenship and boarded a ship for Japan, never to return to the United States. Shedding light on the turmoil within the camps as well as the sensitive and formerly unspoken issue of citizenship renunciation among Japanese Americans, this book explores one man's struggles with the complexities of loyalty and dissent.


Author(s):  
Allan W. Austin

This is the first extensive study of the American Friends Service Committee's interracial activism in the first half of the twentieth century, filling a major gap in scholarship on the Quakers' race relations work from the AFSC's founding in 1917 to the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the early 1950s. The book tracks the evolution of key AFSC projects, such as the Interracial Section and the American Interracial Peace Committee, that demonstrate the tentativeness of the Friends' activism in the 1920s, as well as efforts in the 1930s to make scholarly ideas and activist work more theologically relevant for Friends. Documenting the AFSC's efforts to help European and Japanese American refugees during World War II, the book shows that by 1950, Quakers in the AFSC had honed a distinctly Friendly approach to interracial relations that combined scholarly understandings of race with their religious views. Highlighting the complicated and sometimes controversial connections between Quakers and race during this era, the book uncovers important aspects of the history of Friends, pacifism, feminism, American religion, immigration, ethnicity, and the early roots of multiculturalism.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Onion

Since World War II, the American discourse around children and science has been held in the form of a postmortem: a series of diagnoses pointing to a commitment gap that never seems to be fixed. The formation “Children don’t love science like they used to” points to an imagined past, full of the joy of experimentation and discovery. Although some now argue that we no longer actually face a scientific “manpower shortage,” the popular belief that we do is deeply ingrained, coming, as it does, from this vision of a lost time of utopian explorations. This book, a twentieth-century cultural history of the “science kid,” asks what the stakes of this belief might be. It argues that the nostalgic vision of “a time when American kids loved science” tends to represent these “science kids” as male. If we’re stuck associating the qualities of a potential young scientist—curiosity, mischievousness, a certain free way of thinking that sometimes borders on the antisocial—with masculinity, what effect might this persistent set of associations have on the attempt to recruit women into STEM fields?


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-69
Author(s):  
Claudia Mareis

This article discusses a particular strand in the history of creativity in the mid-twentieth century shaped by an instrumental, production-oriented understanding of the term. When the field of creativity research emerged in the United States after World War II, debates around creativity were driven not only by humanist intents of self-actualization but also by the aim of rendering individual creative potentials productive for both society and economy. Creativity was thus defined in terms of not mere novelty and originality but utility and productivity. There was a strong interest, too, in methods and techniques that promised to systematically enhance human creativity. In this context, the article looks at the formation of brainstorming, a group-based creativity method that came into fashion in the United States around 1950. It discusses how this method had been influenced by concepts of human productivity developed and applied during World War II and prior to it. Using the brainstorming method as a case in point, this article aims not only to shed light on the quite uncharted history of creativity in the mid-twentieth century, but also to stress the conducive role of allegedly trivial creativity methods in the rise of what sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has identified as the “creativity dispositif”: a seemingly playful, but indeed rigid, imperative in post-Fordist and neoliberal societies that demand the constant production of innovative outcomes under flexible, yet self-exploitative working conditions.


2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Per Simonsson ◽  
Glenn Sandström

This study outlines a long history of divorce in Sweden, recognizing the importance of considering both economic and cultural factors in the analysis of marital dissolution. Following Ansley Coale, the authors examine how a framework of multiple theoretical constructs, in interaction, can be applied to the development toward mass divorce. Applying a long historical perspective, the authors argue that an analysis of gendered aspects of the interaction between culture and economics is crucial for the understanding of the rise of mass divorce. The empirical analysis finds support for a marked decrease in legal and cultural obstacles to divorce already during the first decades of the twentieth century. However, economic structures remained a severe obstacle that prohibited significant increases in divorce rate prior to World War II. It was only during the 1940s and 1960s, when cultural change was complemented by marked decreases in economic interdependence between spouses, that the divorce rate exhibited significant increases. The authors find that there are advantages to looking at the development of divorce as a history in which multiple empirical factors are examined in conjunction, recognizing that these factors played different roles during different time periods.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 26-28
Author(s):  
Murtazova Sahodat Burievna

The article summarizes the development of musical science in Uzbekistan in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as the efforts of representatives of the industry. It also highlights the activities of scientists who worked in this area in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as specialists evacuated to Uzbekistan as a result of World War II.


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