Historical analysis of the German Democratic Republic has tended to adopt a top-down model of the transmission of authority. However, developments were more complicated than the standard state/society dichotomy that has dominated the debate among GDR historians. Drawing on a broad range of archival material from state and SED party sources as well as Stasi files and individual farm records along with some oral history interviews, this book provides a thorough investigation of the transformation of the rural sector from a range of perspectives. Focusing on the region of Bezirk Erfurt, the author examines on the one hand how East Germans responded to the end of private farming by resisting, manipulating but also participating in the new system of rural organization. However, he also shows how the regime sought via its representatives to implement its aims with a combination of compromise and material incentive as well as administrative pressure and other more draconian measures. The reader thus gains valuable insight into the processes by which the SED regime attained stability in the 1970s and yet was increasingly vulnerable to growing popular dissatisfaction and economic stagnation and decline in the 1980s, leading to its eventual collapse
This book argues that the narrowing focus of the global history of ideas on narratives in historical research, philosophy and political theory neglects the fact that the central concepts of the history of political ideas are articulated in the language of law. Key figures of the history of ideas, like Kant, Hegel and Weber, engaged deeply with the philosophy and sociology of law. This monograph reveals the significance of the legal semantics of the history of ideas.
Cover; Half Title; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Figures; Maps; Preface; Abbreviations; Introduction; Origins; Terminology; Technology; Debates; The experience of armoured warfare; The principles of armoured warfare; The need for a global perspective; Chapter 1 The New Warfare: The First World War, 1914-18 ; The early development of the tank; The tank battles of 1917; Tanks in Palestine in 1917; The tank on the Western Front in 1918; 'Plan 1919'; Conclusion; Chapter 2 Innovation Versus Stagnation: The Interwar Period, 1919-39 ; The role of theory; The evolution of armoured doctrine
This timely book explores immigration into the United States and the effect it has had on national identity, domestic politics and foreign relations from the 1920s to 2006. Comparing the immigration experiences of Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Cubans, Central Americans and Vietnamese, this book highlights how the US viewed each group throughout the American century, the various factors that have shaped US immigration, and the ways in which these debates influenced relations with the wider world. Using a comparative approach, Montoya offers an insight into the themes that have surrounded immigration, its role in forming a national identity and the ways in which changing historical contexts have shaped and re-shaped conversations about immigrants in the United States. This account helps us better understand the implications and importance of immigration throughout the American century, and informs present-day debates surrounding the issue
In the past quarter century we have moved from the Cold War to the Post-Cold War era in Austria, Europe and the world at large. Yet relatively little assessment is available what the change from the Cold War to the Post-Cold War era signaled for Austria's position in the world. Austrian foreign policy went through sea changes. The country lost its exposed Cold War geopolitical location on the margins of Western Europe along the iron curtain. With the removal of the iron curtain Austria moved back into its central location in Europe and rebuilt her long-standing traditional relations with neighbors to the East and South. Austria joined the European Union in 1995 and thus further "Westernized." Its policy of neutrality — so central to its foreign policy during the Cold War — largely eroded during the past quarter century, even though pro forma and for reasons of identity, the country holds on to its neutral position. Austrian failed to join NATO and gained the reputation of a "security free rider.
"This is a book about what people imagine it means to live in a world where private property is dominant, and their fears - and sometimes hopes - about living in a future world where private property has disappeared. In the propertied imagination, private property is a fragile thing, an institution beset by terrifying enemies and racialised and gendered mobs: Levellers and Diggers, socialists and anarchists, fervent religious radicals, abolitionists, feminists, and haughty welfare-state bureaucrats. The history of private property is the history of a recurring nightmare that one or another of these groups would storm the castle and take control. That threatened social chaos is the central unifying story of this book.Private property and the fear of social chaos starts by charting the thinkers who laid the foundations for how we understand private property, including Locke, Burke, Marx and Engels. The book looks at how their ideas have been put into practice in ways that continue to shape the modern world, from Harry Truman's housing policies and the anti-abolitionist George Fitzhugh to Margaret Thatcher and Elon Musk. Arguing that the spectre of 'the mob' has been intimately interconnected with the idea of private property throughout capitalist modernity, the book ambitiously narrates this history from the early colonisation of the Americas to Silicon Valley, and the future of human colonisation in space."
A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Modern Age covers the period from 1918 to the present. Through the lens of the political and international events shaping the period, the introduction traces the gradual demise of the cultural importance of European empires and the emergence of the United States as the predominant cultural model. The following eight chapters of the volume, authored by a diverse range of experts, highlight different aspects of this cultural shift while indicating the historiographical controversies and conceptual developments that shaped the century-long evolution related to each of the specific topics.This richly-illustrated and accessible volume provides deep historical context to the rise of the US as a major cultural force in the modern era. In so doing, it gives the reader a backdrop to the shift of Western empire from the European model of 18th and 19th century imperialism, to the emergence of the US as a cultural hegemon. A feature of contemporary geopolitics that continues to play a key role in the dynamics of cultural exchange and influence playing out on the world stage today.This is volume 6 in the Cultural History of Western Empires set
Settler colonialism is a global and transnational phenomenon, and as much a thing of the present as a thing of the past. In this book, Lorenzo Veracini explores the settler colonial 'situation' and explains how there is no such thing as neo-settler colonialism or post-settler colonialism because settler colonialism is a resilient formation that rarely ends. Not all migrants are settlers: settlers come to stay, and are founders of political orders who carry with them a distinct sovereign capacity. And settler colonialism is not colonialism: settlers want Indigenous people to vanish (but can make use of their labour before they are made to disappear). Sometimes settler colonial forms operate within colonial ones, sometimes they subvert them, sometimes they replace them. But even if colonialism and settler colonialism interpenetrate and overlap, they remain separate as they co-define each other.
Zwischen 1914 und 1918 gerieten 1,4 Millionen "Soldaten des Zaren" in Gewahrsam der deutschen Truppen. Mindestens eine knappe Million brachten die österreichisch-ungarischen Streitkräfte ein. In Rußland, Turkestan und Sibirien wiederum wurden ungefähr zwei Millionen Heeresangehörige der Mittelmächte festgehalten; der überwiegende Teil davon stammte aus der Donaumonarchie. Erstmals ist es nun möglich, dieses Massenphänomen des Ersten Weltkrieges zu überblicken. In mehr als fünfjähriger Forschungsarbeit haben die Autoren Material aus insgesamt fünfzehn russischen und österreichischen Archiven zusammengetragen. Unter Einbeziehung gedruckter Quellen, allen voran mehr als 80 Zeitungen und Zeitschriften sowie rund 150 Memoiren, kann nun ein facettenreiches Gesamtbild der Kriegsgefangenenproblematik in Mittel- und Osteuropa gezeichnet werden. Neben dem Ziel, der Historiographie wissenschaftliches Neuland zu erschließen, ging es allerdings bei den Untersuchungen auch darum, die politische Bedeutung der Thematik in der revolutionären Epoche von 1917 bis 1920 zu bewerten. Eine Frage rückte dabei immer mehr in den Mittelpunkt: Welchen Einfluß haben die "in Feindeshand geratenen Soldaten" auf die frühe Entwicklung des Kommunismus ausgeübt? Abgesehen von ihrer Darstellung der unterschiedlichen Versuche sozialrevolutionärer und nationaler Kräfte, die Gefangenen ideologisch zu beeinflussen, sind die Verfasser in dieser Hinsicht vor allem bemüht, zwei Aspekte hervorzuheben: Erstens ist die Anwesenheit hunderttausender deutscher, österreichischer und ungarischer Soldaten auf dem Territorium des untergegangenen Romanovimperiums eng mit dem Ausbruch jener Konflikte verknüpft, die sich bei vorliegendem Kenntnisstand nur schwer unter dem Begriff "russischer Bürgerkrieg" subsumieren lassen. Zweitens bildet das Netzwerk probolschewistischer Gefangenen- und Heimkehrervereinigungen inner- und außerhalb des Machtbereichs der Bol´seviki den Kern der entstehenden Kommunistischen Internationale. Studien zu den Anfängen der Sowjetunion und der Komintern haben in Hinkunft Aspekte der Kriegsgefangenschaft und ihrer Folgewirkungen größeren Stellenwert einzuräumen ; Up to the 1980s prisoners of war were hardly even mentioned in military history. Only in recent years have scientists acknowledged the importance of this topic. For their investigations some of them chose the First World War, especially the Eastern front, where more than 5 million soldiers were captured until the revolutionary events of 1917/18. Contrary to the few existing studies, the present publication concentrates more on the evaluation of captivity in the historical background rather than on the description of "POW-fates" in "the hands of their enemies". It therefore focuses on the meaning of captivity and repatriation during the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the Communist International. Based on documents of the central archives in Vienna and Moscow, the thesis comes to the following results: On the one hand, conflicts between the soldiers of the Central Powers in the former Tsarist empire, in particular between the Austro-Hungarian nationalities, for example between the "Bolshevik internationalists" and the "Czech Legion", played a decisive role in the beginning of an Eastern European "period of confusion" which can hardly be entitled a "Russian Civil War". On the other hand, former prisoners functioned as founders of the Comintern and leaders of the first communist parties outside Soviet Russia. The activities of POWs thus marked the starting point of the international cadrerecruitment for the Comintern, which became a significant aspect in the foreign politics of the "first proletarian republic" and consequently in the so called "short 20th century" defined by the existance of the USSR and its "satellite states".
Der Band Wien setzt die flächendeckende Bestandsaufnahme des literarischen Lebens in Österreich während des Nationalsozialismus fort. Dem Skandalisieren von Einzelfällen und der Präsenz der Schriftstellerinnen und Schriftsteller im kulturellen Gedächtnis des Landes wird eine umfassende Materialbasis für sachliche Auseinandersetzung mit dem brisanten Thema zur Seite gestellt. Das methodische Anliegen, ein "literarisches Feld" (P. Bourdieu) des deutschen Sprachraums lexikalisch aufzuschließen, wird in einem neuen Typus von Handbuch umgesetzt, einer spezifischen vernetzenden Kombination von Personen- und Institutionenlexikon. Anhand einzelner Parameter wird die Integration der AutorInnen in die unterschiedlichen Systeme von der Monarchie bis zur Zweiten Republik aufgezeigt.
This book draws on a rich set of materials to examine postwar experiences of ex-servicemen who were facially-disfigured during the First World War. Weaving together medical, institutional, amateur and family photographic albums under a social history framework, Jason Bate underscores overlooked aspects of these men's continued hardships after returning home from the front. In particular, a focus is on the private sphere of the family and the complicated world of employment that disfigured veterans navigated on their return. Little attention has hitherto been paid to the aftercare of disfigured veterans once discharged from the army, or the long-term impact on individuals, and the sense of burden felt by families and local communities. In addressing this neglected area, the chapters here illuminate different practices of photography by doctors, nurses, press agencies, and families across the generations to challenge our perceptions of the personal traumas of soldiers and civilians
