scholarly journals Presidential Address: Historical Thinking, C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures, and a Hope for the Twenty-First Century

2006 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25
Author(s):  
Chad Gaffield

Abstract During the past thirty years, researchers have reconceptualized historical change within and across societies. At the time of the “new social history” in the 1960s and 1970s, scholars may have argued about method and the relative importance of “top-down” and “bottom-up” forces but they generally shared key assumptions about historical change including linearity, singularity, and simplicity. By the 1980s, however, historical thinking was becoming part of a campus-wide reconceptualization of change that emphasizes non-linearity, multiplicity, and complexity. An analysis of the discipline of History illustrates how this reconceptualization is laying the foundation for unprecedented horizontal connections of the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, and biomédical fields. C.P. Snow's description of Two Cultures may still apply to many aspects of university life but the profound rethinking now underway in History and other disciplines points to the possibility of interconnected scholarly cultures.

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Steven Ruggles

AbstractQuantitative historical analysis in the United States surged in three distinct waves. The first quantitative wave occurred as part of the “New History” that blossomed in the early twentieth century and disappeared in the 1940s and 1950s with the rise of consensus history. The second wave thrived from the 1960s to the 1980s during the ascendance of the New Economic History, the New Political History, and the New Social History, and died out during the “cultural turn” of the late twentieth century. The third wave of historical quantification—which I call the revival of quantification—emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century and is still underway. I describe characteristics of each wave and discuss the historiographical context of the ebb and flow of quantification in history.


Author(s):  
Poorvi Chitalkar ◽  
David M. Malone

India’s engagement with the institutions and norms of global governance has evolved significantly since independence in 1947. This chapter traces the evolution—beginning with early engagement with international organizations under Nehru, to the waning of its enthusiasm for multilateralism in the 1960s and 1970s, and its struggle for greater voice and recognition internationally in the twenty-first century. Through the prism of its quest for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, its approach to climate change negotiations, global economic diplomacy, and its engagement with global norms, this chapter traces India’s rise as a vital player in the rebalancing of international relations in a multipolar world. However, despite its tremendous progress, some ongoing challenges continue to constrain India’s meaningful participation in global governance at times. The chapter concludes with an assessment of India’s contribution to global governance and its prospects as a stakeholder and shareholder on the global stage.


Author(s):  
Pamela E. Pennock

As we approach the third decade of the twenty-first century, the United States continues to wrestle with defining its role in Middle East conflicts and fully accepting and fairly treating Arab and Muslim Americans. In this contentious and often ill-informed climate, it is crucial to appreciate the struggles, priorities, and accomplishments of Arab Americans over the past several decades, both what has set them apart and what has integrated them into the politics and culture of the United States. Arab American organizing in the environment of minority rights movements in the 1960s and 1970s fostered a heightened consciousness of and pride in Arab American identity....


2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 556-563
Author(s):  
JAY GARCIA

Recalling his work as cofounder and contributor toUniversities and Left Review, or the ULR group, in the lead-up to the founding of cultural studies during the 1950s, Stuart Hall noted that much of that work had to do with the United States. “In geopolitical terms we were of course neutralists, hostile to the politics emanating from the State Department in Washington,” Hall wrote, “but culturally we were nonetheless attracted by the vitality of American popular life, indeed to the domain of mass culture itself.” If the ULR group and similar collectives shared an “anxiety about the stupendous power of the booming consumer capitalism of post-war America,” they were also united by an appreciation for the ways the “vitality and raucousness of American culture certainly loosened England's tight-lipped, hierarchical class cultures and carried inside it possibilities – or the collective dream? – for a better future, which we felt was a serious political loss to deny.” Not unrelatedly, by the 1960s and 1970s, cultural studies and certain quarters of American intellectual life were proceeding along comparable tracks. Many American scholars and at least some working in cultural studies moved toward social history that emphasized the “hidden experiences of subordinated groups and classes.” Undertaken in concert with the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this version of social history would ramify widely, furnishing the very questions and analytic habits of many fields, not least American studies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Bouk

This article presents an intellectual and social history of the concept of the baby boom. Researchers first invented the notion of a population bulge in the mid-twentieth-century United States to explain birth rates that were higher than predicted by their theories of a mature population and economy. As the children born during this “baby boom” entered schools in the 1950s, they were drawn into a pre-existing conversation about an educational emergency that confirmed researchers’ suspicions that the bulge would spread crisis over time throughout all of the nation's age-graded institutions. New sociological and demographic explanations of the bulge subsequently merged with heightened talk of generational conflict during the 1960s and 1970s to define, with journalistic help in 1980, the “baby boom generation” and the “baby boomer.” Crisis talk has pursued the boomers into the present, mobilized most effectively by opponents of the welfare state.


1978 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Gluck

AbstractIn the 1960s a group of Japanese historians responded to the contemporary bureaucratic superstate by embarking on a search for a popular past. They began to reexamine Japan's modern experience from the point of view of the people, not the elite, and with special emphasis not on political events but on social forces and attitudes. They rejected Marxism and modernization theory as alien and limiting and sought instead an indigenous methodology that might better fit the Japanese case because it was derived from it. By choosing topics that suggested the importance of popular energies in the development of modern Japan, they endeavored to enlarge the canvas of social history by bringing the people into it as significant subjects of historical change. Their scholarly efforts have drawn the attention of Japanese within and without academic circles and, as this introductory critical essay suggests, may usefully draw that of Western readers as well.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
CASIS

The purpose of this analysis is to differentiate social movements. In this instance, we will be using the hippie/counterculture movements during the 1960s and 1970s in Canada, and those that are occurring in the second decade of the twenty-first century. In particular, this analysis distinguishes right-wing extremist movements in 2016 from groups like the Hippie Movement and the Black Panther Party Movement. Specific reference will be made to contrast the social movements of the twenty-first century that are non-political in nature but are identity-based, versus movements during the 60s and 70s that were political by design and intent. Due to the non-political nature of twenty-first century Violent Transnational Social Movements, they might be characterized as fifth generation warfare, which we identify as identity-based social movements in violent conflict with other identity based social movements, this violence may be soft or hard. ‘Soft violence damages the fabric of relationships between communities as entrenches or highlights the superiority of one group over another without kinetic impact. Soft violence is harmful activities to others which stops short of physical violence’. (Kelshall, 2019) Hard violence is then recognized as when soft violence tactics result in physical violence. Insurgencies are groups that challenge and/or resist the authority of the state. There are different levels of insurgencies; and on the extreme end, there is the resistance of systemic authority.


Author(s):  
Cynthia Wu

Chapter 12 addresses the ways in which Asian American Studies’ overriding insistence on recovering a useable resistant past via the aforementioned rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s has made it troublingly reluctant to examine relevant accommodation. As the title suggests, Wu considers how the intellectual trajectory of the field, dominated by a limited U.S.-centrism, has proved largely ineffective with regard to the twenty-first century influx of international students from Asian countries at U.S. universities.


2021 ◽  
pp. 128-161
Author(s):  
Laura Carter

The second part of this book, of which this chapter is part, is about the ‘history of everyday life’ in practice. This chapter examines the ‘history of everyday life’ in local community settings. It argues that folk museums were the museological vehicles of popular social history in mid-twentieth-century Britain. The British folk museum movement is traced via museum case studies in Luton, Cambridge, York, and the Highlands. Collecting practices, curation, visitors, and the educational programmes within each museum are analysed. The practices of several curator-collectors of everyday life, notably Enid Porter and Isabel Grant, are explored in depth. The chapter argues that folk history, so often thought of as a talisman of the extreme right, was recast at a community level into a feminized and conservative ‘history of everyday life’ for ordinary people. The final part of the chapter connects the ‘history of everyday life’ to debates about the emergence of commercial and industrial heritage in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s.


Author(s):  
Don Howard

Will there be a future for technology ethics as a respected academic discipline among philosophers, scientists, engineers, and the general public? We hope that the answer is, “Yes.” But for that to be so, the field must undertake a frank assessment of its historical origins in Heidegger’s ideology-laden, technology critique and in the environmental crisis of the 1960s and 1970s, along with the nuclear arms race and protests against newer technologies of war deployed in Vietnam. Moreover, technology ethics for the twenty-first century will thrive and will have an impact on technologists and policymakers only if it finds its way to complement its traditional emphasis on risk with an analytical framework that foregrounds the promotion of the human and the common good independent of received assumptions about the moral valence of technology, itself.


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