Download or read book Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany 1890 1945 written by Bernhard Rieger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the obsession for new technology that swept through Britain and Germany between 1890 and 1945. Drawing on a wide range of popular contemporary writings and pictorial material, it explains how, despite frequently feeling overwhelmed by innovations, Germans and Britons nurtured a long-lasting fascination for aviation, glamorous passenger liners and film as they lived through profound social transformations and two vicious wars. Public discussions about these 'modern wonders' were torn between fears of novel risks and cultural decay on the one hand, and passionate support generated by nationalism and social fantasies on the other. While the investigation focuses on tensions between technophobia and euphoria, the book also examines the relationship between responses to technology and the differing political cultures in Britain and Germany before and after 1933. This innovative study will prove invaluable reading to anyone interested in comparative cultural history as well as the history of technology.

Download or read book Technology in Modern German History written by Karsten Uhl and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-01-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People often associate postwar Germany with technology and with its products of mass consumption, such as luxury cars. Even pop music, most notably Kraftwerk (literally 'power station') with songs such as Autobahn, Radioactivity or We are the Robots, disseminates the stereotype of a close link between German culture and technology. Technology in Modern German History explores various forms of technology in 200 years of German history and explains how technology has been fundamental to the shaping of modern Germany. The book investigates the role technology played in transforming Germany's culture, society and politics during the 19th and 20th centuries. Key topics covered include the different stages of industrialization, the growth of networked cities, and the triumph of a teleological narrative of technology as progress. Moreover, it provides a critical revision of the history of high technology which reveals how high-tech euphoria determined certain paths in history regardless of whether the respective technology proved to be successful. In its second part, the volume introduces new avenues in scholarship. Karsten Uhl examines neglected areas, such as rural technologies or the often-overlooked importance of everyday technologies: How did consumers or workers use new technologies? How did they appropriate and modify them? Lastly, the book considers the final decades of the 20th century and asks if they provided a significant new quality of technological change: To what degree and effects did computerization transform professional and private life in Germany? In culture and politics, reinforced by the German variety of environmentalism, the idea of progress was challenged, as the once prevailing vision of progress gave way to new apprehensions of uncertainty evident to this day. Technology in Modern German History brings fascinating insight into a much neglected area of German history for students and scholars alike.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Culture written by Celia Marshik and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This companion provides students and scholars alike with an interdisciplinary approach to literary modernism. Through essays written on a range of cultural contexts, this collection helps readers understand the significant changes in belief systems, visual culture, and pastimes that influenced, and were influenced by, the experimental literature published around 1890-1945.

Download or read book Edwardian Culture written by Samuel Shaw and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edwardian Culture: Beyond the Garden Party is the first truly interdisciplinary collection of essays dealing with culture in Britain c.1895-1914. Bringing together essays on literature, art, politics, religion, architecture, marketing, and imperial history, the study highlights the extent to which the culture and politics of Edwardian period were closely intertwined. The book builds upon recent scholarship that seeks to reclaim the term ‘Edwardian’ from prevalent, restrictive usages by venturing beyond the garden party – and the political rally – to uncover some of the terrain that lies between. The essays in the volume – which deal with both famous writers such as J. M. Barrie and Arnold Bennett, as well as many lesser-known figures – draw attention to the nuanced multiplicity of experience and cultural forms that existed during the period, and highlight the ways in which a closer examination of Edwardian culture complicates our definitions of ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modern’. The book argues that the Edwardian era, rather than constituting a coda to the Victorian period or a languid pause before modernism shook things up, possessed a compelling and creative tenor of its own.

Download or read book Order and Insecurity in Germany and Turkey written by Emre Sencer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines processes of military, political and cultural transformation from the perspective of officers in two countries: Germany and Turkey in the 1930s. The national fates of both countries interlocked during the Great War years and their close alliance dictated their joint defeat in 1918. While the two countries were manifestly different in their politics and culture, both had lost the war and both went through powerful changes in its immediate aftermath. They painted themselves as the victims of a new imperialist order, whose chief representatives were Britain and France. The result was a radical militarism that unleashed violent currents in these countries – developments that were to be more transformative than the impact of the war experience itself.

Download or read book The Fin de Si cle World written by Michael Saler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 894 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive and beautifully illustrated collection of essays conveys a vivid picture of a fascinating and hugely significant period in history, the Fin de Siècle. Featuring contributions from over forty international scholars, this book takes a thematic approach to a period of huge upheaval across all walks of life, and is truly innovative in examining the Fin de Siècle from a global perspective. The volume includes pathbreaking essays on how the period was experienced not only in Europe and North America, but also in China, Japan, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, India, and elsewhere across the globe. Thematic topics covered include new concepts of time and space, globalization, the city, and new political movements including nationalism, the "New Liberalism", and socialism and communism. The volume also looks at the development of mass media over this period and emerging trends in culture, such as advertising and consumption, film and publishing, as well as the technological and scientific changes that shaped the world at the turn of the nineteenth century, such as the invention of the telephone, new transport systems, eugenics and physics. The Fin-de-Siècle World also considers issues such as selfhood through chapters looking at gender, sexuality, adolescence, race and class, and considers the importance of different religions, both old and new, at the turn of the century. Finally the volume examines significant and emerging trends in art, music and literature alongside movements such as realism and aestheticism. This volume conveys a vivid picture of how politics, religion, popular and artistic culture, social practices and scientific endeavours fitted together in an exciting world of change. It will be invaluable reading for all students and scholars of the Fin-de-Siècle period.

Download or read book Moderate Modernity written by Jochen Hung and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2023-02-06 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the fate of a Berlin-based newspaper during the 1920s and 1930s, Moderate Modernity: The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy chronicles the transformation of a vibrant and liberal society into an oppressive and authoritarian dictatorship. Tempo proclaimed itself as “Germany’s most modern newspaper” and attempted to capture the spirit of Weimar Berlin, giving a voice to a forward-looking generation that had grown up under the Weimar Republic’s new democratic order. The newspaper celebrated modern technology, spectator sports, and American consumer products, constructing an optimistic vision of Germany’s future as a liberal consumer society anchored in Western values. The newspaper’s idea of a modern, democratic Germany was undermined by the political and economic crises that hit Germany at the beginning of the 1930s. The way the newspaper described German democracy changed under these pressures. Flappers, American fridges, and modern music—the things that Tempo had once marshalled as representatives of a German future—were now rejected by the newspaper as emblems of a bygone age. The changes in Tempo’s vision of Germany’s future show that descriptions of Weimar politics as a standoff between upright democrats and rabid extremists do not do justice to the historical complexity of the period. Rather, we need to accept the Nazis as a lethal product of a German democracy itself. The history of Tempo teaches us how liberal democracies can create and nurture their own worst enemies.

Download or read book News from Germany written by Heidi J. S. Tworek and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-11 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heidi Tworek’s innovative history reveals how, across two devastating wars, Germany attempted to build a powerful communication empire—and how the Nazis manipulated the news to rise to dominance in Europe and further their global agenda. When the news became a form of international power, it changed the course of history.

Download or read book Coast to Coast written by Prue Ahrens and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-22 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the beginnings of human settlement through to the Cook voyages and beyond, histories of ‘the Pacific’ are stories of contact and connection. This vast region can be charted through histories of encounter between the diverse peoples of the Pacific,the Pacific Rim and the wider world. Coast to Coast explores the networks of modernity that connected the various peoples of the Pacific,Australia and North America as new means of transportation, distribution and communication developed from the mid-nineteenth century.

Download or read book The Architecture of Pleasure written by Josephine Kane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The amusement parks which first appeared in England at the turn of the twentieth century represent a startlingly novel and complex phenomenon, combining fantasy architecture, new technology, ersatz danger, spectacle and consumption in a new mass experience. Though drawing on a diverse range of existing leisure practices, the particular entertainment formula they offered marked a radical departure in terms of visual, experiential and cultural meanings. The huge, socially mixed crowds that flocked to the new parks did so purely in the pursuit of pleasure, which the amusement parks commodified in exhilarating new guises. Between 1906 and 1939, nearly 40 major amusement parks operated across Britain. By the outbreak of the Second World War, millions of people visited these sites each year. The amusement park had become a defining element in the architectural psychological pleasurescape of Britain. This book considers the relationship between popular modernity, pleasure and the amusement park landscape in Britain from 1900-1939. It argues that the amusement parks were understood as a new and distinct expression of modern times which redefined the concept of public pleasure for mass audiences. Focusing on three sites - Blackpool Pleasure Beach, Dreamland in Margate and Southend's Kursaal - the book contextualises their development with references to the wider amusement park world. The meanings of these sites are explored through a detailed examination of the spatial and architectural form taken by rides and other buildings. The rollercoaster - a defining symbol of the amusement park - is given particular focus, as is the extent to which discourses of class, gender and national identity were expressed through the design of these parks.

Download or read book Towards World Heritage written by Melanie Hall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-24 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historic preservation, whether of landscapes or buildings, was an important development of the nineteenth century in many countries. There is however surprisingly little understanding about how it took place, and research into it is narrowly focused. For example, generally landscape preservation from this time is examined separately from buildings; preservation is seen in terms of national narratives, or considered within the contexts of area studies, and it is usually seen from a specific disciplinary perspective. All of these later categorizations did not apply at the time and consequently, a very partial view is achieved. In order to begin unlocking a very complex phenomenon that has helped to define our own age, this dynamic collection of essays brings together an international and transdisciplinary line-up of academics and practitioners to reconsider preservation's origins in the second half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century. With a focus on Britain and the British Empire, and including case studies from the United States, Canada, Sweden, France, Germany, Sri Lanka, 'The Holy Land', and Turkey, this book places preservation in imperial, international, and national contexts, demonstrating that there was far more interaction between different countries in this arena than may be supposed and revealing remarkable but hitherto hidden overlaps and intersections. It examines three main themes: the influence of religion; the political and sub-diplomatic aspects of preservation; and the professionalization of preservation practice. Internationalizing trends already existed through the churches, the universities, and the diplomatic services, as well as familial ties that had an important impact on preservation's epistemic communities and its targets. Other internationalizing factors include an interest in national histories and the histories of architecture and art, particularly when known through illustration; a growing interest in biography especially of 'founding fathers' or famous literary figures; and tourism. Although the focus is on architectural preservation, this book demonstrates that, in this formative period, the preservation of buildings and landscapes needs to be considered together - as it often was at the time - and in context. The conclusion reached is that the preservation movement has to be understood in imperial and international contexts, rather than in simply national or regional ones.

Download or read book Staging Authority written by Eva Giloi and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-10-24 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staging Authority: Presentation and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe is a comprehensive handbook on how the presentation, embodiment, and performance of authority changed in the long nineteenth century. It focuses on the diversification of authority: what new forms and expressions of authority arose in that critical century, how traditional authority figures responded and adapted to those changes, and how the public increasingly participated in constructing and validating authority. It pays particular attention to how spaces were transformed to offer new possibilities for the presentation of authority, and how the mediatization of presence affected traditional authority. The handbook’s fourteen chapters draw on innovative methodologies in cultural history and the aligned fields of the history of emotions, urban geography, persona studies, gender studies, media studies, and sound studies.

Download or read book Authenticity The Cultural History of a Political Concept written by Maiken Umbach and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-23 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authenticity is everywhere: political leaders invoke the idea to gain our support, advertisers use it to sell their products. But is authenticity a dangerous hoax? What is, and is not, authentic has been hotly debated ever since the concept was invented. Many academics have sought to "unmask" authenticity claims as deceptive. This book takes a different approach. In chapters covering historical and contemporary examples, the authors explore why authenticity, real or imagined, exercises such a powerful hold on our imaginations. The chapters trace how invocations of authenticity borrow from one another, across arenas such as philosophy and theology, encounters with nature, leisure, and mass consumption, political and corporate leadership, left-wing and right-wing ideologies. This cultural history of authenticity is of interest to academic and lay readers alike, who are interested in the significance and history of a concept that shapes how we understand ourselves and the world we live in.

Download or read book Technological Internationalism and World Order written by Waqar H. Zaidi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-03 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1920 and 1950, British and US internationalists called for aviation and atomic energy to be taken out of the hands of nation-states, and instead used by international organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations. An international air force was to enforce collective security and internationalized civil aviation was to bind the world together through trade and communication. The bomber and the atomic bomb, now associated with death and devastation, were to be instruments of world peace. Drawing on rich archival research and focusing on public and private discourse relating to the control of aviation and atomic energy, Waqar H. Zaidi highlights neglected technological and militaristic strands in twentieth-century liberal internationalism, and transforms our understanding of the place of science and technology in twentieth-century international relations.

Download or read book Interrogating Popular Culture written by Stacy Takacs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-04 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interrogating Popular Culture: Key Questions offers an accessible introduction to the study of popular culture, both historical and contemporary. Beginning from the assumption that cultural systems are dynamic, contradictory, and hard to pin down, Stacy Takacs explores the field through a survey of important questions, addressing: Definitions: What is popular culture? How has it developed over time? What functions does it serve? Method: What is a proper object of study? How should we analyze and interpret popular texts and practices? Influence: How does popular culture relate to social power and control? Identity and disposition: How do we relate to popular culture? How does it move and connect us? Environment: How does popular culture shape the ways we think, feel and act in the world? Illustrated with a wide variety of case studies, covering everything from medieval spectacle to reality TV, sports fandom and Youtube, Interrogating Popular Culture gives students a theoretically rich analytical toolkit for understanding the complex relationship between popular culture, identity and society.

Download or read book Haunted Britain written by Kyle Falcon and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great War haunted the British Empire. Shell shocked soldiers relived the war’s trauma through waking nightmares consisting of mutilated and grotesque figures. Modernist writers released memoirs condemning the war as a profane and disenchanting experience. Yet British and Dominion soldiers and their families also read prophecies about the coming new millennium, experimented with séances, and claimed to see the ghosts of their loved ones in dreams and in photographs. On the battlefields, they had premonitions and attributed their survival to angelic, psychic, or spiritual forces. For many, the war was an enchanting experience that offered proof of another world and the transcendental properties of the mind. Between 1914 and 1939, an array of ghosts lived in the minds of British subjects as they navigated the shocking toll that death in modern war exerted in their communities.

Download or read book The Next War in the Air written by Brett Holman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-17 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early twentieth century, the new technology of flight changed warfare irrevocably, not only on the battlefield, but also on the home front. As prophesied before 1914, Britain in the First World War was effectively no longer an island, with its cities attacked by Zeppelin airships and Gotha bombers in one of the first strategic bombing campaigns. Drawing on prewar ideas about the fragility of modern industrial civilization, some writers now began to argue that the main strategic risk to Britain was not invasion or blockade, but the possibility of a sudden and intense aerial bombardment of London and other cities, which would cause tremendous destruction and massive casualties. The nation would be shattered in a matter of days or weeks, before it could fully mobilize for war. Defeat, decline, and perhaps even extinction, would follow. This theory of the knock-out blow from the air solidified into a consensus during the 1920s and by the 1930s had largely become an orthodoxy, accepted by pacifists and militarists alike. But the devastation feared in 1938 during the Munich Crisis, when gas masks were distributed and hundreds of thousands fled London, was far in excess of the damage wrought by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz in 1940 and 1941, as terrible as that was. The knock-out blow, then, was a myth. But it was a myth with consequences. For the first time, The Next War in the Air reconstructs the concept of the knock-out blow as it was articulated in the public sphere, the reasons why it came to be so widely accepted by both experts and non-experts, and the way it shaped the responses of the British public to some of the great issues facing them in the 1930s, from pacifism to fascism. Drawing on both archival documents and fictional and non-fictional publications from the period between 1908, when aviation was first perceived as a threat to British security, and 1941, when the Blitz ended, and it became clear that no knock-out blow was coming, The Next War in the Air provides a fascinating insight into the origins and evolution of this important cultural and intellectual phenomenon, Britain's fear of the bomber.