Introduction: Modern Prostheses in Anglo-American Commodity Cultures

Author(s):  
Claire L. Jones

This chapter provides an introduction to the commodification of prostheses in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain and United States. By addressing some of the main processes used to commodify prostheses - invention, design and production; use and consumption; and promotion and patenting – it highlights how the medical profession, surgical instruments makers and individuals with physical impairments not only participated in shaping markets for new and modified assistive devices, but by doing so, redefined what it meant to be ‘abled’ and ‘disabled’ in this period. It argues that the redefinition of disability in this period – as a medical affliction that needed to be ‘corrected’ – led to the rise of disability rights activism in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. The previously little explored history of prostheses commodification, introduced here, formed no small part in the rise of these movements.

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 38 (6) ◽  
pp. 1033-1033
Author(s):  
THOMAS E. CONE

This book offers the reader an enormous amount of information about the history of medicine in America and at the same time is a delight to read. One would expect nothing else from Professor Shryock who is, in my opinion, our foremost medical historian. No one has been more successful than he in showing that the history of the medical profession represents a significant phase of our social and cultural evolution. Excellent work has been done in this area previously by Doctor Packard in his well received History of Medicine in the United States and by Doctor Sigerist in his superb study Amerika und die Medizin.


Author(s):  
Alfred L. Brophy

This chapter discusses the role of historical analysis in property law. The history of property has been used to offer support for property rights. Their long history makes the distribution of property look normal, indeed natural and something that cannot or should not be challenged. However, historically in the U.S there have been competing visions of property. From the Progressive era onward especially, the history of property has been used to show the unequal distribution of property and to offer an alternative vision that expands the rights of non-owners of property. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the history of opposition to feudalism and protection of the rights of non-owners was used to protect the rights of non-owners. Thus, the history of property has been a tool of judges and legislators to support property rights and it has also been, less frequently, a tool of critique.


This book is the first collection of scholarly essays on alternate history in over a decade and features contributions from a mixture of major figures and rising stars in the field of science fiction studies. Alternate history is a genre of fiction which, although connected to the genres of utopian, dystopian and science fiction, has its own rich history and lineage. With roots in the writings of ancient Rome, alternate history matured into something close to its current form in the essays and novels of the nineteenth century. In more recent years a number of highly acclaimed novels have been published as alternate histories, by authors ranging from science fiction bestsellers to Pulitzer Prize-winning literary icons. The success and popularity of the genre is reflected in its success on television with original concepts being developed alongside adaptations of iconic texts. This important collection of essays seeks to redress an imbalance between the importance and quality of alternate history texts and the available scholarship and critical readings of texts, providing chapters by both leading scholars in the field and rising stars. The chapters in this book acknowledge the long and distinctive history of the genre whilst also revelling in its vitality, adaptability, and contemporary relevance, with many of the chapters discussing late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century contemporary fiction texts which have received little or no sustained critical analysis elsewhere in print.


2020 ◽  

This collective monograph is a comprehensive study of the causes, evolution and outcomes of complex processes in the contemporary history of the countries of Central and South-Eastern Europe, and aims in particular to identify common and special characteristics in their socio-economic and political development. The authors base their work on documentary evidence; both published and unpublished archival materials reveal the specifics of the development of the political landscapes in these countries. They highlight models combining both European and nationally oriented (and even nationalist) components of the political spheres of particular countries; identify markers which allow the stage of completion (or incompletion) of the establishment of a new political system to be estimated; and present analyses of the processes of internal political struggle, which has often taken on ruthless forms. The analysis of regional and country-specific documentary materials illustrates that the gap in the development of the region with “old Europe” in general has not yet been overcome: in the post-Socialist period, the situation of the region being “ownerless” and “abandoned”, characteristic of the period between the two world wars, is reoccurring. The authors conclude that during the period from the late twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries, the region was quite clearly divided into two parts: Central (the Visegrad Four) and South-Eastern (the Balkans) Europe. The authors explore the prevailing trends in the political development of Hungary and Poland related to the leadership of nationally and religiously oriented parties; in the Czech Republic and Slovakia the pendulum-like change in power of the left and right-wing parties; and in Bulgaria and Romania the domestic political processes permanently in crisis. The authors pay special attention to the contradictory nature of the political evolution of the states that emerged in the space of the former Yugoslavia. For the first time, Greece and Turkey are included in the context of a regional-wide study. The contributors present optimal or resembling transformational models, which can serve as a prototype for shaping the political landscape of other countries in the world. The monograph substantiates the urgency of the new approach needed to study the history and current state of the region and its countries, taking into account the challenges of the time, which require strengthening national and state identity. The research also offered prognostic characteristics of transformational changes in the region, the Visegrad Four, and the Balkans.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Thomas Albert Howard

This chapter begins with discussion of the three organizations drawn from numerous comparable ones established in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the interfaith center of New York, the Interreligious Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (KAICIID). The chapter seeks to understand where interreligious dialogue came from and where is it headed. It also evaluates its broader historical, social, and ethical significance. The chapter hazards answers to these questions through an inquiry into several major turning points in the history of interreligious dialogue, for even as many today extol, practice, theorize, and/or theologize about interreligious dialogue, few have attended carefully to its genesis and past. The chapter takes the premodern world as a starting point, where it examines several harbingers of interreligious dialogue. Canvassing the premodern world for harbingers helps us to see that while contemporary interfaith dialogue is in some respects a novelty, it is nonetheless not altogether discontinuous with the past. Ultimately, the chapter recognizes the distinction between interfaith dialogue and interfaith social action.


2019 ◽  
pp. 77-88
Author(s):  
Keramet Reiter

This chapter provides an overview of the history of supermax prisons: facilities built across the United States in the 1980s and 1990s in order to hold “problem” prisoners, like gang members, the seriously mentally ill, the extremely violent, and those sentenced to death, in solitary confinement for months and years at a time. Since nearly every state opened one of these facilities in the late twentieth century, prisoners have litigated the constitutionality of the harsh conditions: no human contact, 24-hour fluorescent lighting, limited time outdoors. In spite of these conditions, supermaxes were not just another popular tough-on-crime innovation; state (not federal) prison administrators designed the first supermaxes with little public knowledge or oversight, in response to organized protests in prisons in the 1970s and 1980s. Although prisoners have sought to challenge these facilities, litigation has, in many cases, played a legitimizing in the history of supermaxes.


Tempo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (289) ◽  
pp. 30-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hunter Coblentz

AbstractThis article serves as an introduction to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century musical practices that have made use of glass instruments and objects. Emphasis is placed on those practices that use glass in a raw, acoustic manner, and those that take advantage of the precision with which glass can be tuned. First, a general history of glass music is presented, followed by an overview of the physical and acoustic aspects pertaining to the material that are relevant to those composers wishing to integrate glass into their works. Finally, the composers, performers and instrument builders who have made significant use of glass in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are surveyed.


Author(s):  
Christopher Sellers

The changing ways in which human surroundings interact with human bodies have yielded some of the field's most innovative scholarship. These developments reflect trends in health and medicine from the late twentieth into the early twenty-first centuries. This article concentrates on a few representative areas where this intermeshing of socio-cultural with Hippocratic history has proven especially fruitful. It begins with the changing consideration of industrial health history. It discusses that fuller range of social and political contexts and contingencies have shaped the recognition and control of the industrial hazards and have brought new depth and realism to our understanding of the health history of industrial workplaces. The assertions and conclusions about worker influence on the outcome of struggles over occupational health have helped generate greater interest in just how workers themselves perceived and experienced these ailments.


Author(s):  
Colleen T. Dunagan

Chapter Two demonstrates how commercials employ genre-specific codes and conventions to operate as discursive assemblages. The author adopts Grossberg’s concept of cultural formations as a model for analyzing dance in advertising. Through close readings of several commercials created for US companies produced between 1948 and 2012, the chapter offers an historicized reading of the strategic intersections between dance, television, film, and advertising within commercials to produce a form of marketing that simultaneously reinforces and destabilizes disciplinary boundaries. Several concepts central to the larger project are introduced here, including liveness, advertising positioning strategies, direct address and hailing, montage, and film musical conventions. While the study focuses on an analysis of the history and conventions of dance-in-advertising in the United States during the mid-to-late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it also includes examples of commercials created to advertise US products in foreign markets.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-358
Author(s):  
Andrew Scull

Michel Foucault remains one of the most influential intellectuals in the early twenty-first century world. This paper examines the origins and impact of his first major work, Folie et déraison, on the history of psychiatry, particularly though not exclusively in the world of Anglo-American scholarship. The impact and limits of Foucault’s work on the author’s own contributions to the history of psychiatry are examined, as is the larger influence of Madness and Civilization (as it is known to most Anglophones) on the nascent social history of psychiatry. The paper concludes with an assessment of the sources of the appeal of Foucault’s work among some scholars, and notes his declining influence on contemporary scholars working on the history of psychiatry.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document