Tag: europe

Cameras on the Nation’s Darkest Hour

Recent BBC Culture article, Christian Petzold: How Germans today confront the Nazis, takes a look at how the attitude of German filmmakers has changed in the past 15 years and how the cinema is turning the cameras on the nation’s darkest hour in films and TV. Read more on what Nina Hoss, an actress in the latest German film to address the war and its aftermath Christian Petzold’s Phoenix, has to say bbc.com/culture

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Browse some of Berghahn’s relevant titles on the topic of Nazi portrayal and postwar cinema in Germany & Europe.

 

POLISH FILM AND THE HOLOCAUST
Politics and Memory
Marek Haltof

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The Norwegian Constitution, A ‘Living Document’

 

When it was signed May 17, 1814, the Constitution of Norway was considered one of the most radical Constitutions of the day. To celebrate the 200th year since it was first enacted, editors Karen Gammelgaard and Eirik Holmøyvik and their contributors have written a collection of historical accounts about the document. Their book Writing Democracy: The Norwegian Constitution 1814-2014 was published this month. Following, the editors provide more information about the history of this guiding document as well as the history of the volume.

 

 

 

What drew you to the study of the Norwegian Constitution?

 

For researchers in Norway it has been impossible not to be drawn to the Norwegian Constitution these last few years due to the bicentenary in 2014.

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Medical Care as a Matter of Life and Faith

During the Holocaust, Jewish physicians were faced with mounting challenges to providing care, but, amazingly, were still able to maintain many of the conventional standards of medical care. Written based on accounts of these physicians and, in some cases, their children, Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust tells the stories of these doctors and their incredible work in a “dark hour of recent history.” Following, editor Michael A. Grodin explains how he happened on the fascinating subject that became the heart of this soon-to-be-released volume.

 

 

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What drew you to the study of medical practices during the Holocaust?

 

I began the project on medicine and the Holocaust over 25 years ago. As a psychiatrist, I specialized in the care of Holocaust survivors and their families and worked with several twin survivors researched on by Dr. Joseph Mengele.

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Celebrate Women with Aspasia!

Today, September 4th, is the anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, where over 4,750 delegates from several countries were in attendance. Issues discussed at the conference included poverty, education, health, economic rights, and more.

From UNWomen.org: “The United Nations has organized four world conferences on women. These took place in Mexico City in 1975, Copenhagen in 1980, Nairobi in 1985 and Beijing in 1995. The last was followed by a series of five-year reviews. The 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing marked a significant turning point for the global agenda for gender equality. The Beijing Declaration and the Platform for Action, adopted unanimously by 189 countries, is an agenda for women’s empowerment and considered the key global policy document on gender equality.”


To celebrate the anniversary of this historic conference and its benefit to women worldwide, we’d like to invite you to glance a free sample issue of Aspasia, or sign up for a 60-day free trial by clicking here.




About Aspasia

Aspasia is the international peer-reviewed annual of women’s and gender history of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (CESEE). It aims to transform European women’s and gender history by expanding comparative research on women and gender to all parts of Europe, creating a European history of women and gender that encompasses more than the traditional Western European perspective. Aspasia particularly emphasizes research that examines the ways in which gender intersects with other categories of social organization and advances work that explores transnational aspects of women’s and gender histories within, to, and from CESEE. The journal also provides an important outlet for the publication of articles by scholars working in CESEE itself. Its contributions cover a rich variety of topics and historical eras, as well as a wide range of methodologies and approaches to the history of women and gender.

Read the founding statement from the first issue of Aspasia here.

 

The Road to Belonging is Paved with Charity

Catherine Trundle’s recently published volume Americans in Tuscany: Charity, Compassion, and Belonging explores the lives of American female migrants to Italy, and follows a collection of women as they navigate Tuscan society in an attempt to integrate. The author discovered that these women have used charitable acts as a road map to guide their quest to belong. Following, the author provides more information about her background and how it led her to share the stories of this migrant group.

 

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What drew you to the study of American female migrants in Italy and their quest for inclusion?

 

I had conducted previous ethnographic work on American migrants to rural New Zealand, and was fascinated with what it meant to be an American abroad – how one’s sense of nationality and citizenship gets transforms through engagements with the stereotypes that others have of the migrant self, and how ‘culture’ gets characterized and sometimes essentialized in the process.

 

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Today In History

Born on July 30, 1863, Henry Ford was an American industrialist, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, and sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production. Although Ford did not invent the automobile or the assembly line, he developed and manufactured the models of automobiles that converted its use from an expensive curiosity into a practical transport that middle class Americans could afford. His global vision resulted in many technical and business innovations which greatly impacted the context of the twentieth century.

 

“Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.” – Henry Ford

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Berghahn is happy to present some relevant titles in the area of transportation and industrial development:

 

forthcoming!

ATLANTIC AUTOMOBILISM
The Emergence and Persistence of the Car, 1895-1940
Gijs Mom

Volume 1, Explorations in Mobility Series

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A Swiss Interpretation of the American Park

The Swiss National Park is a re-figuring of the American National Park, but with an emphasis on science. This idea of a scientific park is the focus of Patrick Kupper’s Creating Wilderness: A Transnational History of the Swiss National Park, published this month. Below, read an excerpt from the author’s Turku Book Prize-winning book.

 

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Today’s national parks differ vastly around the globe, not only in appearance but also in purpose: they shall protect biodiversity, landscape, or wilderness and serve for tourism, edification, or research. The term “national park” provides a common denominator for all this diversity, yet the denominator itself is indistinct. How shall one cope with this irritating complexity?

 

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Crisis, Power, and Policymaking in the New Europe

This is a special post written by guest editor Bilge Firat on the thematic focus for Volume 23, Issue 1 of Anthropological Journal of European Cultures.

 

How does power work as an analytic, as a relational reality, and as a capacity to impose and resist through policymaking processes in contemporary Europe, and why should anthropologists care about this line of inquiry? These questions constituted the main pivot for contemplation for the five contributors in AJEC’s new special issue “Culture, Power, and Policy in the New Europe”.

 

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Researching Relevance, or How Sociology Preserved the Church

In Benjamin Ziemann’s historical account Encounters with Modernity: The Catholic Church in West Germany 1945-1975, to be published next month, the author explains how the church attempted to systematically — using the tools of social science — maintain its relevance in post-war German society. Following, the author explains how he, almost completely by accident, happened upon this research that would lead to his future book.

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Rather than being the result of meticulous planning, I stumbled over this topic by chance. Originally, I had an interest in writing about the Catholic milieu in 1950s West Germany, and thought that starting with the miners at the Ruhr would be a good idea, not least because I taught at Bochum at the time. One of the challenges that I faced was to gather data on the practiced piety of Catholic workers such as church attendance or Easter Communions, which I thought were difficult to obtain. While I spent time pursuing other hints in the Essen municipal library, I found reports by the “Pastoral Sociological Institute of the Diocese in Essen” (PSI) for the late 1950s. This institute had broken down a count of churchgoers in Essen according to social strata, gender and other social characteristics. Here, I had all the data that I seemed to need.

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Transnational Ahead of Its Time: Author Examines Council of Women

National borders are broken down in Oliver Janz and Daniel Schönpflug’s soon-to-be-released collection Gender History in a Transnational Perspective: Networks, Biographies, Gender Orders. The contributors examine historic cross-continent networks of European feminists. Following a short introduction from the author is a excerpt from Karen Offen’s chapter, in which the author examines the International Council of Women, which she considers “transnational” before the term was coined.

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Karen Offen introduces this first part of the volume with reflections on a fundamental question: Can the category “transnational” be applied to the early international women’s movement, even though its representatives did not yet employ the term.

 

Historical scholarship is pressed to justify anachronistic terminology. It seems, though, that its use is often unavoidable, since historians’ implicit and explicit questions about the past always stem from their own present. Also, from a theoretical and methodological point of view, employing anachronistic terms allows for clearer analytical terminology as the linguistic horizon of the contemporaries is often ambivalent, contradictory and multifold. 

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