The Modern City

Author(s):  
DIANE E. DAVIS

What constitutes modern Mexico? Is there a clear distinction between the historic and modern Mexico City? And if there are, does this distinctions hold up throughout the twentieth century, when what is apparent is a mix of legacies coexisting overtime? This chapter discusses the semiotics of history and modernity. It discusses the struggle of the Mexico City to find its own image including its struggle to preserve historic buildings amidst the differing political alliances that either promote change or preserve the past. However, past is not a single entity, hence if the preservation of the rich history of Mexico is pursued, the question arises as to what periods of history represented in the city are to be favoured in its future development. In this chapter, the focus is on the paradoxes of the Torre Bicentenario and on the pressures to preserve Mexico’s past, the ways they have been juxtaposed against the plans for its future and how the balance of these views has shifted over time. It determines the key actors and the institutions who have embraced history as opposed to progress, identifies the set of forces that dominated in the city’s twentieth-century history, and assesses the long-term implications of the shifting balance for the social, spatial and built environmental character of the city. The chapter ends with a discussion on the current role played by the cultural and historical authorities in determining the fate of the city.

Author(s):  
Frances R. Aparicio

This chapter examines the stories of the first-generation, immigrant parents of the Intralatino/as interviewed for the book. I analyze their personal stories of migration from their home countries, the romantic encounters with their partners as National Others, and the emerging conflicts and resistance on the part of their relatives and family members that they faced as they decided to start a family with a partner who was not of their own national community. That Chicago was the site for these inter-latino encounters speaks to the rich history of immigrant arrivals to the city. Historicizing the social meanings and tensions produced by interlatino/a desire and romance in Chicago, I highlight the courage and resilience of these interlatino couples given the challenges most of them faced for marrying outside their national community.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-160
Author(s):  
Ronald Torrance

There are few resources amongst contemporary Chinese literary criticism that manage to weave such insightful literary readings and incisive historical research as Kristin Stapleton’s Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family. The book accomplishes three feats, as set out by Stapleton in her introductory chapter, simultaneously incorporating a history of twentieth-century Chengdu (and its relevance to the developments in China during this period, more broadly) alongside the author’s biography of Ba Jin’s formative years in the city and the historiographical context of his novel Family. Such an undertaking by a less skilled author would have, perhaps, produced a work which simplifies the rich historical underpinnings of Ba Jin’s Family to supplementary readings of the novel, coupled with incidental evidence of the political and social machinations of the city in which its author grew up. Not so under Stapleton’s careful guidance. By reading the social and economic development of early twentieth-century Chengdu as much as its fictional counterpart in Ba Jin’s Turbulent Stream trilogy, Stapleton provides a perceptive reading of Family which invites the reader to consider how fiction can enrich and enliven our understanding of history.


2013 ◽  
Vol 93 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Ramírez ◽  
William B. Taylor

Abstract Colonial inhabitants of Mexico City were accustomed to coping with natural disasters, including disease epidemics, droughts, floods, and earthquakes, which menaced rich and poor alike and stirred fervent devotion to miraculous images and their shrines. This article revisits the late colonial history of the shrine of Our Lady of the Angels, an image preserved miraculously on an adobe wall in the Indian quarter of Santiago Tlatelolco. The assumption has been that archiepiscopal authorities aiming to deflect public worship toward a more austere, interior spirituality suppressed activities there after 1745 because they saw the devotion as excessively Indian and Baroque. The shrine has served as a barometer of eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms even though its story has not been fully told. This article explores the politics of patronage in the years after the shrine’s closure and in the decades prior to the arrival on the scene of a new Spanish patron in 1776, revealing that Indian caretakers kept the faith well beyond the official intervention, with some help from well-placed Spanish devotees and officials. The efforts of the new patron, a Spanish tailor from the city center, to renovate the building and image and secure the necessary permissions and privileges helped transform the site into one of the most famous in the capital. Attention to earlier patterns of patronage and to the social response to a series of tremors that coincided with his promotional efforts helps to explain why a devotion so carefully managed for enlightened audiences was nevertheless cut from old cloth.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3 (27)) ◽  
pp. 159-162
Author(s):  
Mikhail V. Shilovsky

The review provides a detailed analysis of the research of doctor of science S.G. Sizov, dedicated to the daily life of Omsk during the Civil war. It is noted that the author, using archival materials and a large volume of various periodicals, was able to give a detailed picture of everyday life in Omsk during one of the most difficult periods in the history of Russia in the twentieth century, when the city became the White capital of Russia. Despite some omissions, according to the reviewer, the monograph makes a valuable contribution to the study of everyday life not only in Omsk, but throughout Russia during the social cataclysm of 1917-1920.


Author(s):  
René van Weeren ◽  
Tine De Moor

Abstract Marriage is generally regarded as a decisive moment in the life course of individuals. As the social, but also the legal status of women and men changes as soon as they enter marriage and – by extension – their preceding wedding engagement, registers are and were being kept to record this life event in most societies. The difficulty in studying the long-term development of marriage patterns is the need for, among other things, detailed information about the marriage formation process. Most of the research on marriage patterns is based on a limited amount of data. Data either cover only a limited period (at most several consecutive decades), a limited number of variables, a relatively small number of marriages, and/or a relatively small town or region. The Amsterdam marriage banns registers are an exception to the above, in terms of content, focus area, and volume. In this article, we present the dataset results of the Citizen Science project ‘Ja, ik wil!’ [‘Yes, I do!’], involving over 500 participants retrieving a wide range of socio-economic data on over 94,000 couples from the rich source of the historical Amsterdam marriage banns registers, covering every fifth year between 1580 and 1810.


Author(s):  
Graciela Mateo Pietro

“Al rico nunca le ofrezcan / y al pobre jamás le falten”. Estos versos del Martín Fierro -obra maestra de la narrativa gauchesca argentina- remiten al Monte de Piedad de Buenos Aires: por un lado, esencializan la función social como institución proveedora de crédito a los sectores desamparados de la sociedad, y por otro permiten identificar a su autor, José Hernández, como miembro del Consejo de Administración de la entidad y tenaz defensor de su continuidad.El presente artículo estudia, a partir de los antecedentes del crédito pignoraticio y del rol desempeñado por los montepíos nativos a mediados del siglo XIX, el origen y la trayectoria del Monte de Piedad de Buenos Aires, destinado a aliviar las penurias de los sectores vulnerados, tanto nativos como inmigrantes, evitando que sean víctimas de la usura. En tal sentido y desde una perspectiva macro que dé cuenta de la situación económico- financiera del país y particularmente de la provincia de Buenos Aires, se privilegia el análisis micro de las distintas etapas de la historia de este entidad y de su función social; desde su fundación en 1877 dependiente del Banco de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, su incorporación una década después al patrimonio municipal y su conversión en 1904 en Banco Municipal de Préstamos. El punto de partida es un estado de la cuestión sobre el tema. Las fuentes primarias (Libros de Actas, Memorias y balances, Cartas orgánicas, Reglamentos de la institución, Diario de Sesiones de la Legislatura bonaerense y del Consejo Deliberante de la ciudad de Buenos Aires) así como algunas publicaciones periódicas de la época, resultan sustantivas para lograr el objetivo propuesto. “Never offer to the rich /and may the poor never lack” These verses by Martín Fierro -a masterpiece of Argentine gaucho narrative- represent the Monte de Piedad in Buenos Aires and its development. In a way, they essentialize the social function of this institution that provides credit to the underprivileged sectors of society. Besides, this affirmation allows to identify its author, José Hernández, as a member of the entity’s Board of Directors and a tenacious defender of its continuity.This article is based on the antecedents of the pledge credit and the role played by the native montepíos in the mid-19th century. Its focused in the study of the origin and trajectory of Monte de Piedad in Buenos Aires, as an institution which alleviated the hardships of the vulnerable sectors, both natives and immigrants, and prevented them from being victims of usury. Both macro and micro perspectives converge in this analysis. Firstly, the argentine economic and financial situation is taken into account to get to Buenos Aires’ province evaluation. Secondly, the history of this entity’s social function is examined since it was founded in 1877 (under the Bank of the Province of Buenos Aires), to its incorporation a decade later into the municipal patrimony and its conversion into the Municipal Bank of Loans, in 1904.The article starts with a bibliographic review of this particular subject. The proposed objective is achieved by analyzing diverse primary sources (Minutes Books, Memories and balances, Organic Letters, Institution Regulations, Journal of Sessions of the Buenos Aires Legislature and the Deliberative Council of the city of Buenos Aires) as well as the main periodical publications of the time.


Author(s):  
Louis Corsino

Chicago Heights was a twentieth-century city. The defining movements of the century—urbanization, industrialization, and immigration—tell much of the city's history and provide an understanding of the social conditions leading to the emergence of organized crime. This chapter takes a brief look back at these historical developments as they played themselves out in the Chicago Heights context. Following this, it traces the history of the vice operations in Chicago Heights from their beginning in the early 1900s, to their union with the Chicago Outfit in the 1920s, to their ascendance and decline throughout the remainder of the century. The chapter suggests that the rise development and decline of the Chicago Heights Outfit run parallel in many ways to the fortunes of the city.


2003 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 999-1023 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara Betta

Studies and reminiscences, which dissect the communities of the Baghdadi trade diaspora, have so far tended to over-emphasize the smooth Anglicization process experienced by Baghdadi Jews in British India, Singapore and China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The myth of the Sassoons as the ‘Rothschilds of the East’ has, in particular, distorted and enhanced the representation of Baghdadi Jews as wealthy, Anglicized and thoroughly integrated in British social circles. In reality, if we want to unravel the multi-layered history of Baghdadi Jews from India to Japan we must not only analyse in depth the complexities of the westernization process of the Baghdadi upper classes but also reconstruct carefully class divisions within Baghdadi communities. With this aim in mind, this essay will investigate the various strands of identity developed by Baghdadis during their stay in Shanghai and will especially focus on the local allegiances forged between Baghdadi and British settlers, the so-called Shanghailanders. The following pages will, at the same time, delineate the social structure of the Baghdadi community in Shanghai and will indicate that westernized affluent Baghdadis were forced to confront painfully their own ‘other’: destitute vagrant co-religionists who hailed from the Middle East and India and roamed between the various nodes of the Baghdadi diaspora. The period considered in this essay stretches from 1845, the year the first Baghdadi trader set foot in the city, to the middle of the 1930s when large numbers of Jewish refugees from Europe started to flock to Shanghai in search of a safe haven.


Author(s):  
Felicitas Becker

The future of relations between Tanzanian Muslims and the state is in the balance as recriminations between reformists and Bakwata continue, and the outline of potential compromises between Ansar and Lailah Muslims is as yet hard to see. Beyond the acceptance of basic religious practices, being Muslim meant very different things to different people at different times: a privileged connection to coastal sites of exchange for pre-colonial big men; social ascendancy for pre-colonial patricians, but social equality to inter-war immigrants; full participation in the social and ritual life of the village for rural converts in the mid-twentieth century; an increasingly problematic separate allegiance for post-colonial Tanzanians. The permutations of public ritual are covered. The concern about ignorance is not in itself a product of post-colonial political rhetoric. The chapter then discusses the political topography and the distribution of religious affiliations. The history of town and countryside helps in the understanding of the context that has shaped academic representations of Swahili culture as an urban culture. The Ansar and the debate on Islam and modernity are explained. The Islamist movements in the Southeast and East Africa at large draw on allegiances and grievances rooted in both recent and long-term history.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Cubero Hernández ◽  
María Teresa Pérez Cano

Abstract The rich history of the city of Seville has provided it a wide architectural heritage, which is necessary to preserve. In the early twentieth century, Spain began to express concern about the preservation of its historical legacy, trying to protect historical and artistic monuments. However, it was not until the arrival of the democratic political system that this awareness of preservation took true precedence over other matters. In this temporal context, the young Andalusian Government was looking for definitive venues for the new institutions, with the target of the upcoming Universal Exhibition of Seville in 1992. The recognized architect Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra was commissioned to study a range of buildings in the city susceptible of hosting new uses, published in the book “Cien Edificios de Sevilla, susceptibles de reutilización para usos institucionales”. This work has become a reference catalogue of Sevillian-built heritage. Looking at the one hundred (100) buildings studied there, all of a certain scale in the city, 18 are convents or exconvents. This paper will try to find out the destiny of these buildings themselves as monastic heritage, but also in relationship to other types of heritages.


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