Suchergebnisse

This volume brings together essays that consider wounding and/or wound repair from a wide range of sources and disciplines including arms and armaments, military history, medical history, literature, art history, hagiography, and archaeology across medieval and early modern Europe.

Similarly to the First World War, the lesser known Chaco War, fought between Paraguay and Bolivia (1932-1935), is a conflict characterised by the excesses of twentieth century 'supermodernity'. The physical and emotional traces of the Chaco War are numerous, yet academic studies have previously concentrated on the latter's military history as the centre of their attention. It is the aim of this paper to introduce the potential for an archaeological and anthropological analysis of the Chaco War, thereby using Fortín Boquerón as a means of exemplification. Many of the fortines or military posts, which during the years of conflict constituted crucial focal points in the Chaco landscape, have survived into the present day. Fortín Boquerón represented the setting for one of the most legendary and gruelling battles of the war in question. Partially restored and turned into a tourist attraction throughout the course of the past twenty years, it has now evolved into an invaluable site of interest for the multi-disciplinary investigation techniques of modern conflict archaeology.

Some dominant traditions in Refugee Studies have stressed the barrier which state citizenship presents to the displaced. Some have condemned citizenship altogether as a mechanism and ideology for excluding the weak (G. Agamben). Others have seen citizenship as an acute problem for displaced people in conditions, like those of the modern world, where the habitable world is comprehensively settled by states capable of defending their territory and organised in accordance with interstate norms, which leaves very limited space for the foundation of new communities with their own meaningful citizenship (H. Arendt). This paper engages with these prominent approaches, but also with more recent arguments that, when handled and adapted in the right way, the practices and ideology of citizenship also present opportunities for the displaced to form their own meaningful communities, exercise collective agency, and secure rights. It is argued that the evidence from ancient Greece shows that ancient Greek citizenship, an early forerunner of modern models of citizenship, could be imaginatively harnessed and adapted by displaced people and groups, in order to form effective and sometimes innovative political communities in exile, even after opportunities to found new city-states from scratch became quite rare (after c. 500 BC). Some relevant displaced groups experimented with more open and cosmopolitan styles of civic interaction and ideology in their improvised quasi-civic communities. The different kinds of ancient Greek informal 'polis-in-exile' can bring a new perspective on the wider debates and initiatives concerning refugee political agency and organisation in the 'provocations' in the special issue of which this article forms part.

From the late 1960s to the early '80, at least 10 major and many smaller inquiries were held into abuse, failures of care, and maladministration in NHS psychiatric and 'mental handicap' hospitals. This chapter provides an overview of how cultures of abuse, in its many forms, had permeated the structures and practices of some hospitals providing long-term care for decades. What social, cultural and political mechanisms active in medicine, nursing and beyond facilitated the exposure of these practices by the press and persistent campaigners, forcing politicians to order lengthy and costly inquiries? How did the inquiries help bring about change to the provision of long-term care in the 1970s and contribute to the widespread closure of the old Victorian asylums from the 1980s?

This article traces what recent research and primary sources tell us about psychotherapy in Communist Europe, and how it survived both underground and above the surface. In particular, I will elaborate on the psychotherapeutic techniques that were popular across the different countries and language cultures of the Soviet sphere, with a particular focus upon the Cold War period. This article examines the literature on the mixed fortunes of psychoanalysis and group therapies in the region. More specifically, it focuses upon the therapeutic modalities such as work therapy, suggestion and rational therapy, which gained particular popularity in the Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The latter two approaches had striking similarities with parallel developments in behavioural and cognitive therapies in the West. In part, this was because clinicians on both sides of the 'iron curtain' drew upon shared European traditions from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, this article argues that in the Soviet sphere, those promoting these approaches appropriated socialist thought as a source of inspiration and justification, or at the very least, as a convenient political shield.

The October Revolution brought about a radical shift in the cultural sphere. A new generation of artists and writers was formed. Their orientation towards the future and critical attitude to the past initiated a new chapter of revolutionary and proletarian culture. In Soviet Ukraine, this new artistic cohort in addition embraced national sentiments advancing a culture that was both Soviet and Ukrainian. This article examines the artistic and ideological development of Mykola Khvyl'ovyy (1893–1933), a writer and publicist who championed the ideological struggle for the autonomous project of a Soviet Ukrainian literature to be developed independently from Russian patterns. In this article, Khvyl'ovyy's ideas as presented in his early prose and pamphlets, written during the so-called Literary Discussion of 1925–1928, are used to outline the writer's vision of Soviet Ukrainian culture. These ideas are examined against the backdrop of the political developments of the decade characterised by the gradual toughening of the political and ideological climate Union-wide. It is argued that, during the 1920s, an autonomous cultural project in Soviet Ukraine was developed on a par with the centrally endorsed canon of all-Soviet culture implemented in every Soviet republic as a by-product of the korenizatsiya (indigenisation) campaign introduced in 1923. By the early 1930s, the all-Soviet canon gained prominence, whereas the project of an autonomous Soviet Ukrainian culture vanished together with its main representatives, who, in most cases, were physically annihilated. Khvyl'ovyy's suicide in May 1933 symbolically drew a line under the 1920s decade of transition, with its relative ideological and political tolerance as well as its artistic experimentation.

A turning point in European administrative and documentary practices was traditionally associated, most famously by Robert-Henri Bautier, with the monarchies of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. By summarizing previous research in this field, as well as by using both published and unpublished sources, this article intends to underline an earlier process of transition connected to the development of significant new techniques for the production and preservation of documents in Renaissance Italian city-states. Focusing on the important case of Florence, the administrative uses of records connected to government, diplomacy and military needs will be discussed, and evidence will be provided that such documentary practices accelerated significantly during the so-called Italian Wars (from 1494 onwards). A particular reason of interest for Florence at this time is that a major role in the production and storage of a large quantity of state papers was played by Niccolò Machiavelli, one of the outstanding political thinkers of the age. This was especially true in connection to the new militia which he himself created in 1506. By stressing the role of information management and the importance of correspondence networks at a time of war and crisis, this article also contributes to recent scholarship which has focused on the growth of public records relating to diplomacy in Italy during the second half of the fifteenth century, as well as to a recent field of historiography which has lately gained importance: namely the 'documentary history of institutions'.

The 1970s saw a resurgence of interest in the paranormal. In the mass media, as well as in academic and popular conferences across the world, metal-bending, telepathy, clairvoyance, and remote viewing were avidly debated. In Britain, attention to the paranormal was sparked by visits of Uri Geller. Scientists, and physicists in particular, sought to explain the phenomena. This article explores the social life of paranormal science in Birkbeck College in the 1970s and its links to radical critiques of scientific norms and practices. It traces the scientific and political thinking of physicists as different as John Hasted and David Bohm. Para-physics provided a small group of scientists with a way to reflect on the three crises of politics emerging out of capitalism, the Cold War, and Stalinism.

Many of the forms and practices of interwar internationalism were recreated under the auspices of the Nazi 'New Europe'. This article will examine these forms of 'Axis internationalism' by looking at Spanish health experts' involvement with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Despite the ambiguous relationship between the Franco regime and the Axis powers, a wide range of Spanish health experts formed close ties with colleagues from Nazi Germany and across Axis and occupied Europe. Many of those involved were relatively conservative figures who also worked with liberal international health organisations in the pre- and post-war eras. Despite their political differences, their opposing attitudes towards eugenics and the tensions caused by German hegemony, Spanish experts were able to rationalise their involvement with Nazi Germany as a mutually-beneficial continuation of pre-war international health cooperation amongst countries united by a shared commitment to modern, 'totalitarian' forms of public health. Despite the hostility of Nazi Germany and its European collaborators to both liberal and left-wing forms of internationalism, this phenomenon suggests that the 'New Europe' deserves to be studied as part of the wider history of internationalism in general and of international health in particular.

Faith and Fortune: visualizing he divine on Byzantine and early Islamic coins was an exhibition at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts (October 2013-January 2015). It reflected on ways in which the rise of Islam in the seventh century shaped global political and economic systems, and how the early Islamic government and the Christian Byzantine Empire expressed the religious loyalties of their states visually. The exhibition, however, attempted to move away from traditional approaches to presenting coins, focusing almost exclusively on them as images and political documents. Instead, this exhibition sought to convey a sense of coins as economic artefacts, tightly woven into the day-to-day fabric of ordinary lives in a period of extraordinary change. This article examines how the spatial, textual and temporal intersected in historical theory and exhibition design and suggests that exhibition represents an alternative method both of presenting (and teaching) but also of undertaking research.

Sexual violence is a serious problem within armed services. This article explores intra-service rape – that is, rape carried out by servicepersonnel against other servicepersonnel – in branches of the U.S. military from the 1990s to the present. Such forms of violence are often denied by senior military officers and, when acknowledged, routinely minimized. The article begins by establishing the parameters of the crisis of sexual abuse within the US armed services. Second, it explores systematic failures to recognize forms of suffering. Victim-survivors in the military are vulnerable to military-specific obstacles to reporting their abuse and being believed, including contractual restrictions and 'chains of command', organizational cohesion, warrior comportment, interpersonal vulnerability, and gendered and sexual identities. Particular attention is paid to differences by gender and sexual orientation. Third, it analyses the medicalization of suffering in the modern military and its effects. What meanings are assigned to 'military sexual trauma' (MST) and how has that label affected victim-survivors of rape or sexual assault? The article concludes by arguing that the concept of 'trauma' as it is applied to victims of sexual abuse does a formidable amount of political and ideological work.

This article offers a fresh perspective on the historical evolution of energy consumption in Britain from the 1920s-70s. The twentieth century witnessed a series of energy transitions – from wood and coal to gas, electricity and oil – that have transformed modern lives. The literature has primarily charted this transformation by following supply, networks and technologies. We need to know more about people and their homes in this story, because it was here where energy was used. The article investigates the forces that shaped domestic demand by focusing on working class households in public housing. It examines the interaction between political frameworks, public housing infrastructures and the changing norms and practices of people's daily lives. It does so by connecting social and political history with material culture. A set of case studies compares the different paths taken in three urban areas (London; Stocksbridge, an old industrial town; and Stevenage, a "new town") in the provision of new infrastructures of gas, electricity and heating. Evidence collected at the time by the London County Council and other local authorities is used to analyse the uptake, use and resistance to changes in domestic infrastructure and new technologies, such as gas-lit coke ovens, underfloor heating and central heating. The case studies make a more general pitch for a new historical study of energy that places people's lifestyles, their ideas of comfort and political attempts to change them more squarely at the centre of inquiry

From the late medieval period the Crown of Aragon was at the forefront of archival innovation. Culminating in the establishment of the Royal Archive of Barcelona in 1318, this development was not, as is traditionally stated, a mere imitation of external models but the result of an innovative historical process that had its roots in local history and reflected the structure of the Aragonese monarchy. As a result of the later enlargement and decentralization of the Crown, and especially after the advent of the House of Trastámara in 1414, the Aragonese developed an extensive system for record-keeping across the Mediterranean. By focusing on what I describe as a complex archival network, this article analyses a series of administrative developments, which are generally studied in isolation, as interrelated responses to similar needs across disparate and far-flung territories. The results differed within the Iberian dominions (Aragon, Majorca and Valencia) and in the Italian kingdoms of Sicily and Naples, with Sardinia somewhere in between. For all these differences, however, the establishment of a number of financial archives shows that this network had an especially crucial role in defending the royal patrimony in all the territories under the rule of the Crown of Aragon. The authorities also tried to use archives as tools for exercising pressure upon local political elites, as demonstrated, for instance, by the systematic inquiry into feudal possessions and pecuniary rights instigated by King Ferdinand II in early sixteenth-century Sicily. The outcome, however, was totally unexpected.

The first post-revolutionary decades became decisive for the development of the Ukrainian language, national culture and identity. The Ukrainian language, previously subject to a number of bans, finally entered the stage of intensive status and corpus planning. Thanks to this, it became a decisive factor in the rivalry between different forms of statehood vying on the Ukrainian territory after 1917. At the same time, the status upgrade and broader public use called for the standardisation of the language. The first practical steps towards the unification of different orthographic traditions were undertaken from 1918 to 1921. The turbulence of civil war, however, determined the failure of comprehensive language reform. Calls for linguistic unification gained new force in the second half of the 1920s: with the introduction of Ukrainizacija, the local variant of the all-Union nationalities policy of korenizacija introduced in 1923, the Ukrainian language was acknowledged as the means to the republic's Sovietisation. This was part and parcel of the Soviet "affirmative action empire" (Terry Martin) which had to contain the 1917-1921 rise of nationalism of the empire's minorities. Locally, the elites had to negotiate their own interests and the centre's demands. How exactly do the debates on the "correct" codification of the language and the actual steps towards different ideals reflect the changing power dynamic between the centre and the republics in the interbellum USSR? This is the problem this study sets out to tackle using the example of Soviet Ukraine. The paper explores the link between language and politics in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s. While examining the political preconditions for the language policies in Ukraine, significant attention will also be devoted to the specifics of the 1928 spelling reform and its reception by the general public in Ukraine and abroad. In general, it will be argued that in the Soviet Union language was often used as a tool of political consolidation, and the power struggle between different visions of the future of the republics can be seen in debates and reforms of language. Hence, the correlation between Soviet language policies and the subsequent Sovietisation (or Russification) will be highlighted. The subsequent debates around the status of the Ukrainian language, its orthography and vocabulary, exposed the unbridgeable differences between the political elites in the republic and central powers in Moscow. The draft of the new orthography was thoroughly discussed by academics and linguists, representing different parts of Ukraine and the final draft was publicly discussed republic-wide. The spelling reform, adopted in 1929, can rightly be regarded as one of the greatest achievements of Ukrainizatsiia. This newly-acquired status was significantly challenged by the centralisation drive of the Moscow party leadership. This orthography, widely known as 'skrypnykivka' (after the then Commissar for Education Mykola Skrypnyk) or 'Charkiv orthography' was attacked for its attempts to dissociate the Ukrainian language from Russian and 'westernise' the language. After 1933, the main principles of the spelling reform were labelled 'nationalistic'. The reform was quickly abandoned. Furthermore, after 1937, all the corpus planning attempts were geared towards 'purifying' the Ukrainian language from foreign influence, when Russian equivalents and cognates were introduced or prioritised.

This article looks at the fields of psychoanalysis and psychiatry to read socialist Yugoslavia's complex international and political position. It argues that the history of postwar mental health professions in this country opens up a larger social and political story of liberalization and authoritarianism in socialist Eastern Europe. After 1948, the conflict with the Cominform, and split with the USSR, Yugoslavia went on to receive Western material help, as well as political support, and developed its own more liberal and internationally open brand of socialism, predicated on the ideas of workers' self-management and nonalignment. Yugoslav psychiatry and psychoanalysis became the most liberalized and Westernized professions in the region, but they also contributed to the operation of the violent "re-education" program at Goli Otok, the most authoritarian and repressive political project in Yugoslav history aimed at "re-educating" pro-Stalinists in the Yugoslav Communist Party. In this article, those two sides of the Yugoslav psychiatric profession will be demonstrated through the prism of self-management. First, the article discusses the application of psychotherapeutic techniques and self-management in the violent context of re-education camps for political prisoners. A similar combination of psychoanalysis and principles of self-management in "civilian" and Westernized child psychiatry is analysed in the second part. The article shows how these very similar notions and ideological principles could be used within the same sociopolitical framework and by the same profession but for radically different purposes.