pre-World War Research Articles

A Field Guild to Murder & Fly Fishing by Tim Weed

Reviewed by: A Field Guild to Murder & Fly Fishing by Tim Weed Susan Sugai Tim Weed. A Field Guild to Murder & Fly Fishing. Green Writers Press, 2017. In A Field Guild to Murder & Fly Fishing, Tim Weed masterfully leads the reader on a journey through urban and natural landscapes where boys and men face challenges involving death and deception. Although the information overload of social media and smart phone apps seems to render a “field guide” as an anachronism, Weed’s place-based stories, laced with an occasional dash of magical realism, allow time travel back to the past. Most stories take place in the late 1970s to mid-1980s, where Generation X boys and men struggling with their self-identity and societal role are lulled by drugs and peer pressures. Fly fishing plays a key role in this collection where “catch and release” rituals demonstrate the respect that hunters have for their prey, providing insight into the narrator’s distinction between empathy and murder when a teenager shoots a jay as target practice in “The Camp at Cutthroat Lake” or when an arrogant charter fisher is accidently lost at sea in “The Afternoon Client.” Indeed, Weed’s field guide provides the reader with a key to identifying characters so estranged from their natural environment (like James in “The Foreigner”) they cannot distinguish reality from conjured images. Earth is a water planet and many of the stories in A Field Guide to Murder and Fly Fishing involve liquid or solid state water. In “Tower Eight,” bullied Gen X misfits dive from granite ledges into a New Hampshire quarry while high on LSD in the summer of 1982 and in winter, downhill ski while tripping out. In “Diamondback Mountain,” the pre-World War II skiers at an alpine resort in the Colorado Rocky Mountains are intoxicated with their female companions and trigger an avalanche trying to impress them. “Keepers,” the final story, has the most contemporary backdrop, where Elliott is fly [End Page 67] fishing in Nantucket while racing an incoming tide and a departing ferry schedule. His lost “four-hundred-dollar rod,” like the lost “four-hundred-dollar spinning rig” of “The Afternoon Client,” portends the failure of the hunter’s instincts. Earth’s atmosphere is a unique feature of the planet and plays a key role in Weed’s Field Guide, too. In “Mouth of the Tropics,” when leaving the Amazon basin of Venezuela, Meech experiences turbulence in a seven-passenger Cessna, as does Kevin in his white-knuckled flights between New Bedford and Martha’s Vineyard in “Scrimshaw.” In both cases, the same model small plane yields a rough ride that mirrors the disruption to forged relationships with coworkers Juan and Phil, who were deeply entwined within their communities. In “The Dragon of Conchagua,” a wreck of a vintage Cessna that John stumbles upon in the approach to his climb of an Andean volcano with his brother Gabe, foreshadows the harrowing bus ride on the narrow highway “hugging the sides of Andean foothills that cradled the chaotic ugliness of the outer barrios of Quito.” The loss of relatively intact natural environments witnessed through the construction of vacation mansions on Martha’s Vineyard in “Scrimshaw” and the conversion of the Highlands Ranch in the Colorado Front Range into subdivisions in “Six Feet under the Prairie” result in collateral damages that in the minds of Weed’s characters approach murder of the land and the livelihoods it supported. Unlike fake news and misinformation found in Twitter feeds and Facebook posts, Weed’s short stories draw us away from the blue light of device screens. Under the blue skies and dark waters of A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing, readers can feel pain, empathy, and purpose bubbling out from the sharp-detailed mental images. Although James’s photographs of Granada in “The Foreigner” required the tactile experience of removing unex-posed silver halide salts from photographic films or papers, pixilated digital images can now appear on our electronic devices without effort or lag time. The conflicts facing Tim Weed’s characters and places seem more urgent today than in the times in which the stories are based. The reader cannot...

"The Fabulous Irishman": Lord Mayor Robert Briscoe's "Unusual Religious and National Combination" in Cold War America

"The Fabulous Irishman":Lord Mayor Robert Briscoe's "Unusual Religious and National Combination" in Cold War America Rachel Gordan (bio) Little remembered today, but much discussed at the time was the visit of the Jewish Lord Mayor Robert Briscoe of Dublin to the United States in the spring of 1957. Stranger-than-fiction, but also typifying what Cold War Americans wanted to believe was possible among their own Jewish citizens, Mayor Briscoe embodied an unexpected combination of religious and national loyalties. "The Lord Mayor," explained typical American newspaper coverage of Briscoe's visit, "embodies the unusual combination of a devout orthodox Jew and a zealous Irish patriot."1 The irony was that Briscoe was not American, proving that the freedom of opportunity and religion that Cold War Americans viewed as fundamental to their own purported exceptionalism, actually occurred to varying degrees in other countries—although often without the fanfare typical in the US context. Still, Briscoe's six-week American visit, the media's attention to it, and the television drama that Briscoe inspired, provide a view into Cold War American fears and desires around Jews, religious fealty, citizenship, and the particular way in which midcentury American discourses around religious freedom found a primary example in Jews, such as Briscoe, and their religion. At a time when a tri-faith image of postwar America as a country of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews was widely accepted, Briscoe's presence and popularity in the U.S. helped to affirm America's embrace of religious freedom—albeit a freedom constrained to just three religions, and even more crucially, although rarely made explicit, to those individuals understood as racially white. As Kevin Schultz's study of "tri-faith America" explains of the era's credo: "The ethnic, religious, and racial divisions that had been predominant in pre-World War II America no longer had a place in the defining traits of good Americanism. With enemies such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, the ideal of tolerance was sacrosanct, and during the war years the kind of tolerance that was [End Page 401] lionized most was that between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews."2 This tri-faith ideal had practical results, Schultz points out, challenging the nation to rethink the distribution of power and who was deserving of social, political, and cultural recognition. In line with this rethinking of American society, Robert Briscoe prodded American observers to reconsider their stereotypes of clannish Jews, and he affirmed postwar Jewish allegiance to religion as an ideological core of their identity. Although Briscoe was an "Irish import," America's reception of him during his spring 1957 tour symbolized the unusual role that Jews played in serving as evidentiary proof of midcentury America's ideal of religious freedom.3 Briscoe would spend six weeks in North America. In that time, he became a celebrity, as newspapers around the country followed his tour and as a result of his television and radio appearances. In its coverage of Mayor Briscoe, the media all over the country broadcast an image of the Jewish mayor as embodying religious freedom—an American value freighted with political saliency during the Cold War, which according to President Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, was a battle between those who believed in the moral laws of the Judeo-Christian tradition and those who found value in materialist secularism. When quoted in the press, Briscoe's messages were about Ireland's religious freedom, but American embrace of Briscoe nonetheless symbolized America's attachment to these values. "Briscoe Says He's Live Evidence There 'Absolutely Is No Bigotry in Ireland'" ran one typical headline in the Los Angeles Times that connected Briscoe's celebrity with his embodiment of religious freedom.4 As Leo Braudy, a scholar of American culture notes, fame in Western society has long been associated with the ideal of freedom, because fame can be understood as the "social version of a love that absolves the loved one of fault, restoring integrity and wholeness." With fame, the celebrity is granted recognition and permission to be himself. "To be famous for yourself, for what you are without talent or premeditation, means you have come into your rightful inheritance...

Educational Activities of the National Film Archive in Warsaw Connected with Pre-World War II Films

This article describes the educational actions (including the use of them in education) related to pre-war films conducted by the National Film Archive in Warsaw. First to exemplify this phenomenon, I focused on the works of three silent films: Mania. The history of a cigarette factory worker (Mania. Die Geschichte einer Zigarettenarbeiterin, 1918, directed by Eugen Illés), Pan Tadeusz ([Sir Thaddeus, 1928, directed by Ryszard Ordyński) and Zew morza ([The call of the sea], 1927, directed by Henryk Szaro), which have undergone a complete digital reconstruction during the Nitrofilm project (2008–2014) in the National Film Archive. The aim is to show how knowledge about silent film is communicated to the audience, and how these movies can be used to achieve educational goals/targets. The theoretical framework of this essay is examining the changing function of film archives, where technological change, the possibilities of restoration and digitization of films contributes to increasing popularisation of audiovisual heritage by film archivists and museums. An essential category in this essay is the authenticity both for the reconstructed film and its presentation. The perception of authenticity often determinates strategies for presentation of this heritage. The article is based on qualitative research (interviews with the audience and workers at the film archive;participant observation, press materials and websites).

Od reformne do alternativne pedagogije: pokušaji drugačije škole u Hrvatskoj u 20. stoljeću

Modernizacijski procesi na svim razinama koji su se odražavali na svakodnevni život i bili glavnim uzrocima reforme života, društvenih, kulturnih i pedagoških pokreta europskog fin de sièclea reflektirali su se i na Hrvatsku, osobito na njezina urbana područja. Europska je reformna pedagogija sa svojim glavnim predstavnicima i koncepcijama, barem na informativnoj razini, dopirala do hrvatskih učitelja. Začetnici reformne pedagogije u Hrvatskoj su zagrebački učitelji Vjekoslav Koščević i Ivan Tomašić. Njihova reformska nastojanja manifestirala su se u istupima protiv herbartovske pedagogije, u prikupljanju iskustava i spoznaja o reformnim pedagoškim pokretima u srednjoeuropskim zemljama i njihovoj implementaciji u vlastitu pedagošku praksu te u pokušajima organiziranog promicanja ideja reformne pedagogije kroz Hrvatsko društvo za unapređenje uzgoja i časopis Preporod. Brojni su učitelji i učiteljice osluškivali puls početka „stoljeća djeteta“ i diskretno prilagođavali svoju pedagošku praksu novom duhu. Nakon Prvoga svjetskog rata – u novoj državnoj zajednici Kraljevini Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca (od 1929. Kraljevini Jugoslaviji) – hrvatski su se učitelji angažirali na području praktične školske reforme odnosno didaktičko-metodičke obnove, koja je značila nastavak procesa započetog prije Prvoga svjetskog rata. Radna škola kao glavni cilj didaktičko-metodičke obnove postala je tridesetih godina 20. stoljeća i službeno pedagoško usmjerenje, pod snažnim uplivom prosvjetne politike i ideologije ondašnje jugoslavenske države. Funkciju učiteljskih ferijalnih tečajeva radne škole, kao modela stručnog usavršavanja učitelja za novu školu, od sredine tridesetih preuzimaju državne ogledne škole. Glavni predstavnici pokreta radne škole u Hrvatskoj bili su: Ante Defrančeski, Josip Demarin, Mate Demarin, Salih Ljubunčić, Marijan Markovac, Zlatko Špoljar, Stjepan Zaninović i drugi. Tijekom dva međuratna desetljeća u Hrvatskoj se profiliraju akademski obrazovani pedagozi, teoretičari koji su se bavili ključnim pitanjima pedagogije kao (duhovno)znanstvene ili filozofijske discipline i istodobno održavali vezu s aktualnom pedagoškom zbiljom i kritički upozoravali na neke negativne pojave u praksi nove škole: Stjepan Matičević, Pavao Vuk-Pavlović, Stjepan Pataki, Vladimir Petz i drugi. Refleksije reformne pedagogije zamjetne su i u ostalim sferama odgojno-obrazovnog rada kao što su: obrazovanje odraslih, zdravstveno prosvjećivanje, socijalna skrb i zaštita djece, organizacije djece i mladih, suradnja roditeljskog doma i škole te različiti oblici kulturnog i umjetničkog rada s djecom i za djecu. Alternativni pedagoški koncepti odškrinuli su 1990-ih vrata pedagoškom i školskom pluralizmu u Hrvatskoj, no on je i nakon dva desetljeća u početnoj fazi razvoja.

Strategies for translating racist discourse about African-Americans into Slovenian

Abstract This article examines how racist discourse about African-Americans has been translated from English into Slovenian throughout history. Strategies for translating explicitly racist discourse, racial terminology and African American Vernacular English in translations published between 1853 and 2007 are analyzed. The results of the textual comparison are considered in the light of contemporary Slovenian attitudes towards black people and the socio-political situation in the target culture. The results show that the strategies for translating racist discourse in pre-World War II translations differed significantly from those used after a socialist regime was established in Slovenia. Translation strategies were also influenced by the important role that the Slovenian language played in the development of the national identity, by the target readership of the translations, as well as by contemporary relations between the source and target culture. Ideological interventions sometimes considerably affected the interpretive possibilities of a particular literary work.

Republishing Pre-World War II Hungarian Women Writers After the Fall of Socialism

Immediately before and shortly after the collapse of socialism in 1989, a large number of private publishing houses were founded in Hungary. Some of them began their career by republishing the novels of selected popular Hungarian women writers of the preWorld War II era that had been banned following the Soviet occupation of the country in 1945. The lack of comprehensive literary criticism on the works of women authors drove the new publishers to rely on the so-called “oral canon” of collective memory, which had saved some of their names from oblivion. To grab the attention of prospective readers, the books selected for publication were provided with modern book cover designs, reflecting new, but still patriarchal values. After a brief overview of how prewar literature was censored after 1945, focusing on the editors’ inevitable reinterpretation of the writings of Renée Erdős, Mrs. Kosáry Lola Réz, and Anna Tutsek through book cover designs, Kádár aims in this paper to survey in what ways and how successfully the re-editions of the novels by women writers have contributed to their inclusion in the literary canon since 1989.

Tom Glynn and ‘Pickhandle Mary’ Fitzgerald: Two Irish Syndicalists in Pre-World War One South Africa

Paired in 1911 as Irish ‘rebels’ by Archie Crawford, their mutual mentor, Tom Glynn and Mary Fitzgerald were pioneers of transnational syndicalism, in South Africa. Arriving separately in the country in 1900, they had taken different routes into labour activism, and despite being close political allies, had markedly different outlooks. She was a feminist, whose syndicalism has been judged ‘eclectic’; he, while committed to gender and racial equality, became a proponent of the ‘virile syndicalism’ of the Chicago-line Industrial Workers of the World. This article discusses their journalism in Johannesburg’s Voice of Labour, their roles as leaders in a number of significant labour disputes, the significance of their ‘Irishness’ in a largely British-oriented milieu, their geographical separation in 1911, and the definitive parting of their political ways on the outbreak of the First World War.

Review: Historic American Sheet Music

Book Review| August 01 2017 Review: Historic American Sheet Music Historic American Sheet Music. Molly Bragg, Digital Collections Program Manager, Duke University Libraries. URL: http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hasm/ Kristen M. Turner Kristen M. Turner KRISTEN M. TURNER teaches at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on American operatic culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and has been published in the Journal of the Society for American Music and the Journal of Musicological Research. Her current project is a monograph on the use of opera in vaudeville and pre–World War I American musical comedies. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2017) 70 (2): 565–575. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2017.70.2.565 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kristen M. Turner; Review: Historic American Sheet Music. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 August 2017; 70 (2): 565–575. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2017.70.2.565 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search From medieval manuscripts to parlor songs, musical scores are a popular item for digitization in the United States and Europe. In the United States even libraries with relatively small special collections often hold sheet music from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and many institutions have invested in digitizing this music and posting it online, as few of these documents are under copyright. The larger digital repositories for sheet music include African American Sheet Music hosted by Brown University and the Historic Sheet Music Collection on the Library of Congress's website, as well as the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection at Johns Hopkins/ Peabody and the Digital Collections Archive of Popular American Music at the University of California, Los Angeles.1 Duke University's Historic American Sheet Music Digital Collection (hereafter HASM) is an archive of 3,042 digitized pieces of sheet music (both popular and classical genres) published in the... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Semi-Public Sphere, Maternity, and Regression in Rhys and Mansfield

In her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please (1979), Jean Rhys describes her young adulthood in pre-World War I London. Set adrift from the support of family, Rhys recounts the lovers and friends ...

Becoming Cleopatra: the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin

ABSTRACTThe biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliations that shaped Lemkin’s concept of genocide. In this article, I show that Lemkin, far from being a Jewish Bundist, a Polish nationalist or an apolitical cosmopolitan, was an active member of the interwar Polish Zionist movement, from which he drew the ideas that inspired his idea of the crime of genocide. In the first part of this article, I use his published writings from the 1920s and 1930s in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to recover a rich Jewish political framework in which his concepts of barbarism and genocide first began to emerge. In the second section, I ask how this crucial dimension of Lemkin’s life and thought vanished from the historical record, and why it has yet to be recovered in spite of the boom in biographical scholarship. Finally, I suggest how the recovery of Lemkin’s Zionism helps to reframe the current political impasse in the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies.

Bernard Shaw's Dionysian Trilogy: Reworkings of Gilbert Murray's Translation of Euripides's Bacchae in Major Barbara, Misalliance, and Heartbreak House

ABSTRACT This article outlines how Bernard Shaw reworks elements from Gilbert Murray's translation of Euripides's Bacchae in Major Barbara (1905), Misalliance (1909/10), and Heartbreak House (1916/17), which taken together constitute a Dionysian trilogy. The article further proposes that the Greek example, and especially the Dionysian with its religious implications as propounded by Murray, was crucial to several aspects of Shaw's writing including his politics and economics of equality and his philosophy of a life force, while he himself represented the Dionysian zeitgeist socially, politically, and culturally for that younger generation soon to be decimated in the Great War. This Dionysian Shaw is recognized, as his contemporaries viewed him, as the leading figure in pre–World War I Britain of that first wave of literary modernism, whose impact has been obscured by the better known, perhaps more aesthetically radical, if more politically conservative postwar second wave.

Signal Progress: Early Developments in U.S. Radar TR Switching

When Privates George Elliott and Jo s eph Lockard discovered a large fleet of airplanes approaching Pearl Harbor, Hawai'i, on the morning of 7 December 1941, they were operating a new U.S. Army Signal Corps radar that used the same antenna for transmitting and receiving RF energy [1]. RF engineers had to quickly develop a variety of new techniques to keep the multikilowatt transmitter signals from degrading or damaging the sensitive receivers in those early systems. This past December marked the 75th anniversary of that event. Tying in with the exhibit of related hardware at the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society's (MTT-S) 2017 International Microwave Symposium in Honolulu this June, the goal of this article is to highlight some of the components and circuits used for transmit?receive (T/R) switching in U.S. radars from the pre-World War II era through the following few decades.

Changes in the use practitioner-based complementary and alternative medicine over time in Canada: Cohort and period effects.

BackgroundThe use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is growing. However the factors contributing to changes over time and to birth cohort differences in CAM use are not well understood.SettingWe used data from 10186 participants, who were aged 20–69 years at the first cycle of data collection in the longitudinal component of the Canadian National Population Health Survey (1994/95-2010/11). We examined chiropractic and other practitioner-based CAM use with a focus on five birth cohorts: pre-World War II (born 1925–1934); World War II (born 1935–1944); older baby boomers (born 1945–1954); younger baby boomers (born 1955–1964); and Gen Xers (born 1965–1974). The survey collected data every two years on predisposing (e.g., sex, education), enabling (e.g., income), behavior-related factors (e.g., obesity), need (e.g., chronic conditions), and use of conventional care (primary care and specialists).ResultsThe findings suggest that, at corresponding ages, more recent cohorts reported greater CAM (OR = 25.9, 95% CI: 20.0; 33.6 for Gen Xers vs. pre-World War) and chiropractic use than their predecessors (OR = 2.2, 95% CI: 1.7; 2.8 for Gen Xers vs. pre-World War). There was also a secular trend of increasing CAM use, but not chiropractic use, over time (period effect) across all ages. Factors associated with cohort differences were different for CAM and chiropractic use. Cohort differences in CAM use were partially related to a period effect of increasing CAM use over time across all ages while cohort differences in chiropractic use were related to the higher prevalence of chronic conditions among recent cohorts. The use of conventional care was positively related to greater CAM use (OR = 1.8, 95% CI: 1.6; 2.0) and chiropractic use (OR = 1.2, 95% CI: 1.1; 1.4) but did not contribute to changes over time or to cohort differences in CAM and chiropractic use.ConclusionThe higher CAM use over time and in recent cohorts could reflect how recent generations are approaching their healthcare needs by expanding conventional care to include CAM therapies and practice for treatment and health promotion. The findings also underscore the importance of doctors discussing CAM use with their patients.

Divas down under: the circulation of Asta Nielsen's and Francesca Bertini’s films in Australian cinemas in the 1910s

ABSTRACTThe early Australian cinema market was a lucrative target for export-dependent European film producers, from the French Pathé Frérès to the Danish Nordisk Films Kompagni. By 1913, cinema attendance was a national pastime in Australia, with approximately 12% of the population going to the pictures every Saturday night. Australian film production was innovative but too limited to meet domestic demand. As a result of this disparity in supply and demand, coupled with the innovative artistry of European silent films, a significant percentage of the films shown in Australia in the pre-World War I years were imported from Europe. Initially, most of these films were advertised simply by their title and occasionally the production company. Despite such minimal branding, many of these films were in continuous circulation on urban and provincial cinema circuits for years at a time. However, with the emergence of the monopoly-distribution system and associated rise of the star culture that sold films on the strength of an actor or actress's name, several European stars began to develop an devoted Australian following. Most of the early European stars who made a name for themselves in Australia were women, notably the Danish actress Asta Nielsen and the Italian actress Francesca Bertini. This article maps the scope of these female European stars’ popularity in pre-World War I Australia and explores the circulation conditions that facilitated their stardom, particularly in relation to the transformation of Australian production, distribution, and exhibition systems in the early 1910s, as well as during and after World War I.

1970年代以降のアメリカの所得格差の拡大 : 上位層への所得集中度の大恐慌以前への回帰を中心に(〈格差社会〉をどうみるか,第55回大会共通論題)

1970年代以降のアメリカの所得格差の拡大 : 上位層への所得集中度の大恐慌以前への回帰を中心に(〈格差社会〉をどうみるか,第55回大会共通論題)

From Berlin to Ben Shemen: The Lehmann Brothers between Expressionism and Zionism

The following article deals with the story of two German Jewish brothers, Alfred Lemm and Siegfried Lehmann. The first—a forgotten journalist and writer, the second—a doctor and educator, the founder of the Ben Shemen Youth Village in Mandate Palestine. Through the specific story of the two brothers, the article traces the path of messianic antiurban ideas prevalent in expressionist avant-garde circles in pre–World War I Europe, to the circles of German Jewish Zionism and from them to Palestine-Israel. Though German expressionism was itself an urban intellectual phenomenon, expressionist prose often exemplified antiurban and antimodern sentiments, as in the case of Lemm's prose. According to Lemm, redemption from the ills of modern society shall be found in withdrawal from the modern city and return to physical and metaphysical “roots.” Lemm's antiurban attitude influenced his brother Siegfried and found its full manifestation in the founding of the Ben Shemen Youth Village in 1927.

The Formative Decades of the CPSA

AbstractDrawing on the CPSA's archival records, this article explores the origins of CPSA and the patterns of representation in its founding decades. We focus on the pre-World War II years, when disciplinary boundaries were fluid and scholars sought to shift policy discussion from moral reform to reform guided by science and professionalism. The CPSA's founding vision aspired to engage “typical citizens” in discussion of current issues. Despite the ambitious vision, a much narrower range of citizens participated. The CPSA's powerful melding of academic, corporate, state and political elites, in turn, shaped the CPSA's reflections on the development of the Canadian state and public policy. This historical legacy encourages us to reflect on the contemporary challenges of fostering independent scholarship on public issues.

What Were the So-Called ‘German Bands’ of Pre-World War I Australian Street Life?

‘The ‘German band’ as a concept remains integrally associated with German ethnicity in the Australian public mind though such things as the extroverted oom-pah music of present-day Oktoberfest, or the live and recorded oom-pah music in German or ‘Bavarian’-themed venues. However, the costumed ‘German bands’ that were a feature of nineteenth-century British street and seaside resort life also began to appear ubiquitously in various gold-rush era Australian population centres and remained a fixture of Australian street entertainment until the First World War. Gold-rush era chronicler William Kelly described their music as being able to ‘drive swine into anguish’. Yet they had an opposing reputation for excellence in playing Strauss waltzes, polkas and other popular dance music of the era. They were sought after by dance venue, circus and other theatrical entertainment proprietors and were furthermore hired for private balls, picnics, showgrounds and racetrack entertainment. By appearing at German social functions and venues they buttressed pan-German cultural identity and traditions and, for non-Germans, the sight and sound of a disciplined, groomed and costumed German band provided a mildly exciting cultural tourism experience. In blaring street, circus parade or showground mode they, in fact, conformed to the present-day global stereotype of the Bavarian Biergarten oom-pah band. Through foundation research, this article attempts to apply some social, cultural and musicological ‘flesh and bones’ to what has more or less remained the ‘myth’ of the ubiquitous ‘German bands’ (and their not-always-German bandsmen) that sometimes entertained and charmed pedestrians while at other times represented a social and sonic blot on the streetscapes and public spaces of pre-World War I Australia.

Fifty years of IAA History Symposia (1967–2016)

The International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) Symposia on the History of Rocketry and Astronautics have been held annually at the International Astronautical Congresses since 1967. During these past 50 years nearly 800 papers have been presented and subsequently published in the proceedings.With a 20-year rule imposed for historical presentations, the first 10 symposia concentrated on pre-World War II and early 1950s activities. A surprisingly large number of papers on early, less well-known Soviet-Russian contributions to rocketry and astronautics were presented in the first symposia, despite the ongoing Space Race between the U.S and USSR. Another important element in these symposia involved memoir papers offered by pre- and post-war rocket and astronautics pioneers from many countries, and the participation of many of these pioneers in person. In sum, the history of national space and rocket projects from some 40 countries were presented over the years in IAA History Symposia.These 50 symposia have provided a platform for scholars and professional and non-professional historians to meet and discuss the history of rocketry and astronautics, and to personally interview many space pioneers, most of whom today are deceased. Their personal recollections have since been shared with a large audience.Over time, IAA history papers divided into recognizable periods: ancient times through the 19th century, and the 20th and 21st centuries, which separate among actions and events that took place before 1945, in 1945 to 1957, and after 1957 (which marked the beginning of the space age). Proceedings of the IAA History Symposia have been published in English, ultimately in the History Series of the American Astronautical Society (AAS) and its publishing arm, Univelt Inc., under an agreement secured with the IAA.This paper presents an overview of the IAA History Symposia. It examines the early years of the history committee and its first symposium, the evolution of subsequent symposia, and it recognizes those individuals who shaped these symposia and the publication of its proceedings.

Return Migration and the Rise of the Palestinian Nouveaux Riches, 1870–1925

This article examines the figure of the returning émigré in late Ottoman and early Mandate Palestine. The wave of Palestinians who emigrated in the pre-World War I period did not, for the most part, intend to settle abroad permanently. Hailing largely from small towns and villages in the Palestinian hilly interior, they moved in and out of the Middle East with great regularity and tended to reinvest their money and social capital in their place of origin. The article argues that these emigrants constituted a previously undocumented segment of Palestinian society, the nouveaux riches who challenged the older elites from larger towns and cities in both social and economic terms. The discussion focuses in particular on their creation of new forms of bourgeois culture and the disruptive impact this had on gender and family relations, complicating the assumption that middle-class modernity in Palestine was largely effected by external actors.