Interwar Romanies in the British Pathé (1922–1939)

We need a citizen's coalition to save the NHS

In the turbulent interwar period, the political ‘Left’ was one of the most visible protagonists, with historians continuing to disagree about the role it played in shaping the outcome of the political struggles. Embedded in strong ‘moral narratives’ about the ‘rise of fascism’, the ‘crisis of democracy’, and the nature of the Bolshevik Revolution, the political Left has been vilified or lionized. For the period from the mid-1920s until 1939, both supporters and detractors agree that the Left was on the defensive, internally divided and weakened by the Great Depression and subject to repression by the state, whether democratic, authoritarian, or Stalinist. This chapter argues that the failure narrative should not subsume the vibrant experimentation and rich and contradictory diversity of the Left experience. A portrait emerges of the interwar Left that wrestled with inevitably imperfect and varied solutions to the ‘problem of community life’ in twentieth-century mass society.

The recent ascent of right-wing populist movements in several countries has rekindled interest in understanding the causes of the rise of fascism in the interwar years. In this article, we argue that there was a strong link between the surge of support for the Socialist Party after World War I and the subsequent emergence of fascism in Italy. We first develop a source of variation in socialist support across Italian municipalities in the 1919 election based on war casualties from the area. We show that these casualties are unrelated to a battery of political, economic, and social variables before the war and had a major effect on socialist support (partly because the socialists were the main antiwar political movement). Our main result is that this boost to socialist support (that is “exogenous” to the prior political leaning of the municipality) led to greater local fascist activity as measured by local party branches and fascist political violence, and to significantly larger vote share of the Fascist Party in the 1921 and 1924 elections. We provide evidence that landowner associations and greater presence of local elites played an important role in the rise of fascism. Finally, we find greater likelihood of Jewish deportations in 1943–45 and lower vote share for Christian Democrats after World War II in areas with greater early fascist activity.

Archbishop William Temple (1881–1944) wrote this article in March 1939 as war was looming. The pacifist movement was strong among younger Christians, and young and old were extremely worried about the rise of fascism. Appeasement or a radical rejection of war were often seen as the Christian options. Temple dissents from both and also from the certainties of (Thomist) natural law theology. His approach is more tentative and based on ‘events’, insisting that ‘[w]e must dig the foundations deeper than we did in pre-war years, or in the inter-war years’. He was the son of Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury (1896–1902), and was successively Bishop of Manchester (1921–29), Archbishop of York (1929–42) and himself Archbishop of Canterbury (1942–44). His Gifford Lectures, Nature, Man and God (1934), Readings in St John’s Gospel (1939) and Christianity and the Social Order (1942) are among his best known writings. Editor.

Visual anthropology is a subfield of sociocultural anthropology that encompasses a set of research techniques and modes of representation that are (through production and analysis) concerned with all visible aspects of culture and society. As a research technique, it uses pictorial media as a means of exploring social phenomena and of accessing, evoking, and communicating anthropological knowledge—mainly through the media of ethnographic photographs and films and, since the mid‐1990s, new digital technologies. Furthermore, visual anthropology includes the study of pictorial manifestations of culture, ranging from nonverbal communication, ritual and performance, dance, and art to material culture.

This paper analyses the visions of totalitarian futures in two works written in the interwar period, namely Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Gay Hunter (1934) and Antoni Słonimski’s Two Ends of the World (1937). In both novels, the rise of Fascism, supported by the use of advanced technologies, is shown as directly responsible for the destruction of the known world and for the suppression of individual and collective freedom. While addressing the rise of totalitarianism, both authors also envision humanity’s return to a more primitive state, however, for different purposes. This paper, therefore, explores the intersections as well as differences in the authors’ perceptions of modernity, progress, civilisation and primitivism, as crucial to their extrapolations of humankind’s destiny.

ABSTRACTMy essay examines Yiddish-speaking immigrants in the Netherlands between the two world wars with a focus on Amsterdam, the Jewish center of the country. The Netherlands was never a major recipient of migrants of any kind, let alone Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Despite seeing the Netherlands primarily as a transit site, enough Yiddish-speakers stayed – either due to finding work in the country or because they failed to get entry papers to other countries – that they formed a visible presence in Amsterdam, The Hague, Scheveningen, and other cities across the country. Due to its small size and unstable immigrant population – since most immigrants did not plan on settling in Amsterdam – this community remained on the periphery of the global interwar Yiddish-speaking map. I argue that by being on the margins of the global Yiddish community Amsterdam's left-wing Yiddish-speaking community, organized around the Ansky Society, remained above the sharp politicized polemics that drove a wedge between communists and non-communist leftists in other Yiddish cultural centers not located in the Soviet Union. (There, the Communist Party's Evsektsiia had long ago ended public internecine debates.) I also show that Yiddish-speaking immigrants affected Dutch culture more generally. Because it operated in Yiddish, the Ansky Society was perceived to be marginal in the Netherlands. That marginalization allowed its members the political space (on the margins of both Dutch society and the global Yiddish-speaking diaspora) to advocate for international political positions that in any Dutch-language institution, Jewish or not, would have been considered too radical in a political culture that avoided extremes of any kind. The Ansky Society nonetheless served as the Netherlands' outspoken voice against the rise of fascism in all of its 1930s manifestations. Unlike the mainstream Dutch Jewish community, members of which enfranchised citizens and therefore deeply implicated in party politics and questions of loyalty, the Ansky Society had no such fears, because most of its members lacked citizenship. They were beyond (or perhaps beneath) questions of loyalty. Finally, the Ansky Society also publicly criticized the Dutch government's complacency in the face of fascism spreading across Europe. In other words, Amsterdam's Yiddish-speaking community in the interwar period was doubly marginalized – from global Yiddish culture and from Dutch politics – and was therefore politically empowered.

San Marino, founded by a Christian stonecutter of that name in 301, is not only the oldest state in the world but also one of the smallest, in both size and population. This chapter investigates how democracy flourished so comparatively early, focusing particularly on the period between the end of the First World War and the rise of fascism. It analyses Sammarinese party politics after the Second World War, exploring the main ideological and partisan configurations, including a long tradition of anti- political-establishment parties, and trying to identify the different arenas and moments when the party system changed. The chapter deals with a summary of the main findings. The June 1918 election, the last of the partial elections, foretold what would remain a constant in the interwar period: the political struggle between socialist and conservative forces for the soul of Sammarinese voters.

Efforts to identify the moral and political implications of sociological thought and practice have foundered on the shoals of the dissonances and heterodoxies of its practitioners, no less than have the grand designs to define the scope, theoretical content, and methods of the discipline itself. No Sociology of the upper case emerges from the analyses of the historical and contemporary products of those who have worked in the name of so? ciology; and, despite valiant efforts, no theoretical "paradigm" has plausibly established its parameters as a science. Likewise, all programmatic attempts to configure for the discipline what it politically must "do," "stand for," or "stand up for" (or, alternatively that it should resist all these temptations) have yielded to the exigencies of politics itself?if only of the academic and organizational kind?with typically ironic and often embarrassing re? lationships to competing substantive definitions of the field. It is not surprising, therefore, especially in an era in which the intellectual tools of deconstruction and postmodernism have given privileged place to the devo? tees of skepticism, that some students of the history of sociology have called for both greater forbearance and a more discerning modesty among soci? ologists in their attempts to describe the scientific and political and ethical potentials of the field. One of these, Stephen Turner, has joined with Dirk K?sler in editing a volume of studies that documents sociology's failures to either understand or to engage in a politically effective way the rise of fascism during the interwar period, not to speak of the blatant moral ab?

The Names Heard Long Ago: How the Golden Age of Hungarian Soccer Shaped the Modern Game

This chapter focuses on the international system following World War 1 and efforts to create peace and stability through the League of Nations’ collective security, outlawing war, and various disarmament conferences. It covers the crises of diplomacy related to the expansionist Hitler regime that culminated in the rise of fascism in Italy, the Munich Conference, and the eventual outbreak of World War II.

This chapter identifies three drivers of hegemonic unraveling and transformation in international orders: great-power contestation and alternative order building; how the dominant power’s loss of its “patronage monopoly” enhances the bargaining leverage of weaker states; and the rise of counter-order movements, especially transnational ones, that weaken support for existing international arrangements—sometimes within the leading power itself. Because analysts tend to focus their attention on the relationship between power transitions and great-power wars, they have only recently begun to appreciate the significance of these three processes. This chapter shows that these challenges—from above, below, and within—played a key role in past power transitions and transformations in international order, including the decline of Spanish hegemony, challenges to British hegemony before World War I, the rise of fascism and Bolshevism during the interwar period, decolonization, and the collapse of the Soviet system.

The article discusses the history of the educational system in the Slovene Littoral (Primorska) in the interwar period, focusing on the northern part of the region. It highlights assimilation pressures that started with the Italian occupation at the end of the First World War and intensified with the rise of fascism. In detail, it presents the impact of the school reform of 1923, which was named after the education minister of the time, Giovanni Gentile; in the next twenty years, this reform enabled a systematic denationalisation of Slovenians in Italy and opened the field of education to fascist ideology. Activities in defence of the nation, which relied foremost on patriotic families and Slovenian priests, largely negated this denationalisation.

The 1930s saw a shift in emphasis in the writing of colonial women from the romantic genre to a more realistic style. The depression dampened spirits, and the rise of fascism and Stalinism focused attention onto political and moral issues. The “frivolities” of the twenties gave way to a more sober, even sombre, mood. Colonial literary “realism” was a question of perception but, as Valentine Cunningham has rightly pointed out in another context, what is perceived to be a reality is “as much a part of the truth, the reality of the time, as what ‘actually’ happens.”1 The urban expansion that was set in motion after World War I increased steadily throughout the interwar period. In Kenya, Nairobi grew from a “collection of huts” to an embryonic modern city, while in Algeria more settlers moved from the country to coastal cities and towns of Algiers, Oran, Bone (present-day Annaba), and Bougie (Bejaia) or to inland centers such as Constantine and Tizi-Ouzou.2As urban centers grew so too did the service sectors in them, providing employment opportunities for women. Women in both colonies attained higher profiles in the public sphere, culturally and politically. The growth of the cities and towns, coupled with continued land expropriation, caused displaced Africans and Algerians to drift into these centers in search of a livelihood. More often than not they ended up as manual laborers, although a minority did enter the service sector.

The rise of populist, nationalist authoritarianism in the developed countries did not come out of a clear blue sky; it owed its long-term origins to the growth of inequality, poverty and exclusion, and to coercive policies to enforce low-paid service work. In the short term, the combination of financial crises, stagnating earnings and the increased flows of refugees from war in the Middle East supplied the ideal conditions for its apparently sudden outburst—some of the same circumstances as had seen the rise of Fascism and Nazism in the interwar years.