Suchergebnisse

Kathy Peiss knocks the established literature akilter in her study of the zoot suit. This flashy, over-the-top garb of the 1940s has long been studied as a uniform of hipsters and pachucos in the United States, who were targeted for violent repression by white police and servicemen in the 1943 "Zoot Suit Riots" in Los Angeles. Peiss audaciously opens up her study to discuss the signifier of the zoot suit internationally. In a tour de force, she outlines the sense of cultural identity fostered among zoot suiters and allied long-coat wearers, as well as the political meanings assigned to them, in such diverse places as Mexico, Trinidad, South Africa, and the USSR during the 1940s.

Beauty and business seem opposite terms but in fact have had an important and consequential relationship that business historians are only now exploring. This paper sketches several major themes and approaches to the topic. The first is the emergence of a large sector of the economy devoted to selling beauty aids, fashions, bodily care, and style to American women and men. Another is the deployment of beauty as a business strategy—in creating brands, sales, and marketing; in managing the workplace; and in projecting corporate identities. A third considers the sale of beauty itself, as a value added and attached to a wide range of goods, from art to bodies. These broad approaches suggest new directions for future research.

Résumé

Veränderungen der Sexualität in Zeiten großer sozialer Umschichtungen werden beschrieben. Die Darstellung bezieht sich auf New York City im Zeitraum 1880-1920. Es wird eine urbane Subkultur nachgezeichnet, in der junge Frauen ihr voreheliches Leben auf der Straße, in Tanzpalästen, Theatern und am Arbeitsplatz realisieren, d. h. in gesellschaftlichen Räumen, die für ihre ländlichen oder aus Europa eingewanderten Mütter außerhalb des Möglichen und Erlaubten lagen oder überhaupt nicht existiert haben. Auf der Grundlage zeitgenössischer Berichte und Quellen werden die sexuellen Verhaltensweisen von Arbeiterfrauen für einen begrenzten Zeitabschnitt dargestellt, über dessen Repräsentativität keine konkreten Aussagen möglich erscheinen. Der soziale Wandel bewirkte einen Prozeß, in dem sich innerhalb einer Generation durch die Fabrikmädchen eine komplexe Veränderung des Sexualverhaltens vollzog; dabei vergößerte sich für die Frauen der "Markt der Möglichkeiten", aber es erweiterte sich auch das Terrain der sexuellen Belästigungen. (HA)

During and immediately after World War II, an unlikely band of librarians and scholars, soldiers and spies were dispatched to Europe to collect books and documents, to acquire and preserve the written word as well as provide critical information for intelligence purposes.

"Information Hunters examines the unprecedented American effort to acquire foreign publications and information in World War II Europe. An unlikely band of librarians, scholars, soldiers, and spies went to Europe to collect books and documents to aid the Allies' cause. They travelled to neutral cities to find enemy publications for intelligence analysis and followed advancing armies to capture records in a massive program of confiscation. After the war, they seized Nazi works from bookstores and schools and gather together countless looted Jewish books. Improvising library techniques in wartime conditions, they contributed to Allied intelligence, preserved endangered books, engaged in restitution, and participated in the denazification of book collections. Information Hunters explores what collecting meant to the men and women who embarked on these missions, and how the challenges of a total war led to an intense focus on books and documents. It uncovers the worlds of collecting, in spy-ridden Stockholm and Lisbon, in liberated Paris and devastated Berlin, and in German caves and mineshafts. The wartime collecting missions had lasting effects. They intensified the relationship between libraries and academic institutions, on the one hand, and the government and military, on the other. Book and document acquisition became part of the apparatus of national security, military planning, and postwar reconstruction. These efforts also spurred the development of information science and boosted research libraries' ambitions to be great national repositories for research and the dissemination of knowledge that would support American global leadership, politically and intellectually. military intelligence, librarians, archivists, Library of Congress, Office of Strategic Services."--