Revolutionary Ferment Research Articles

The Political Strategy of Military Reform: Álvaro Obregón and Revolutionary Mexico, 1920-1924

On December 1, 1920, General Álvaro Obregón of Sonora became President of Mexico. During the previous May, his supporters had staged a popular coup d'etat which paved the way for his constitutional election. Mexico was then in the throes of revolutionary ferment, and the instability which had accompanied Obregón's ascendancy to Executive Office also threatened to attend his demise. Obregón thus sought to achieve political and social reforms which would strengthen his regime and allow for a peaceful Presidential succession in 1924. As the major institution of coercion during a time of revolutionary violence, the Army had emerged as the most important political institution in Mexico. Although part of a broader political effort which included labor, agrarian and administrative reforms, Obregón's military reconstruction can be viewed as the important keystone in his attempt to consolidate control of Mexico. Obregón’s military reforms sought to insure, first, Army loyalty to the office of President, and, second, military effectiveness when the Army would be called upon to defend the Federal Government. His reforms grew out of the Agua Prieta movement of May 1920, and continued throughout his own administration. As President, Obregón gave intensive attention to military affairs and his military reforms were the most significant achievement of his broadly based effort to consolidate the Mexican Revolution.

Mary Crawford and the Christian Heroine

It is a matter of commonplace that Mansfield Park is Jane Austen’s most controversial novel—perhaps even, in some ways a failure. Fanny Price who occupies the central position in mediating what is widely thought to be Jane Austen’s point of view, is, in fact, almost completely antipathetic to the attitude to life revealed by Jane’s correspondence with her sister, Cassandra; while Mary Crawford—having won our approval by her good natured intelligence and vivacity—is cast aside, not merely as a threat to Fanny’s romance—what Angus Wilson has called ‘the dusty union’, but as a comprehensive danger to the very foundations of the Mansfield estate, and by extension, to the stability of the whole fabric of society at a critical period of revolutionary ferment. It is also largely agreed that Jane Austen’s supposed intention of writing a novel on the theme of ordination—with all that this implies of a conservative political philosophy—led her to abandon the ironic mode and even compelled her to impose an arbitrary didactic conclusion upon the plot so that virtue might be almost as glibly and sentimentally rewarded as in Pamela.Ironically, much of the misunderstanding and confusion seems to have arisen because it has been believed that Jane Austen wrote her novel under the influence of Evangelical Christianity with all that this implies of regeneration and enthusiasm and disapproval of the smartly decadent values of fashionable London society. This critical response sees Mansfield Park as Jane Austen’s response to the issues of her time—a response in which the religious affirmations of the debate in the chapel at Sotherton and Edmund’s impending commitment to the duties of Thornton Lacey are balanced by secular responsibilities to the management of the estate. In this thematic reading Jane Austen assumes the mantle of Edmund Burke; and clearly, the coherence of such a reading has much to recommend it.

Revolutionary ferment in Finland and the origins of the civil war 1917–1918

Abstract Finland on the eve of independence was a country in which the great mass of the population lived on and earned its living from the land. Of the total 1917 population figure of 3,345,660, 84 per cent still lived in the countryside. Almost two-thirds of the population were dependent upon farming and forestry for their livelihood. In comparison with Sweden, the rate of population growth in Finland after 1860 was higher; but Finland's economic ability to absorb this growing population was much weaker than that of her neighbour. Whereas the proportion of the Finnish population dependent for its livelihood upon industry and handicrafts grew from 7.4 per cent in 1880 to 15.2 per cent in 1910, the corresponding Swedish figures were 17.4 per cent and 32.0 per cent. Urbanisation was also far more advanced in Sweden than in Finland. Emigration helped to alleviate the problems of rural overpopulation, and reached a peak period in the decade 1900–1910, but even then the proportion of Finnish emigrants to the ...

L'hygiène des troupes à la fin de l'Ancien Régime

Marcel Spivak : Troop hygiene at the end of the ancien régime. The question of troop hygiene has been neglected in the recent research into the life of soldiers. It is however of great importance even if only in connection with physical efficiency. There is also another more complex problem, that of the repercussions of the lamentable conditions in which soldiers lived on their behaviour when faced with revolutionary ferment. Influenced by a philosophy which encouraged them to improve some aspects of their troops' material conditions, the successive ministers for war, from Choi-seul to 1789, were perhaps aware of this problem. But it was not until the end of the 19th Century that strict regulations were introduced to put an end to practices which encouraged the propagation of fatal diseases.

Liberation Theology and the Captivities of Jesus

Gustavo Gutierrez is a native of Peru and professor of theology at the Catholic University of Peru. He is also chaplain to the National Union of Catholic University Students and advisor to the Latin American Bishops Conference. Gutierrez is widely credited with having coined the term "liberation theology," and with the recent publication of his A Theology of Liberation (Orbis; 323 pp.; $7.95/4.95) North American readers are challenged by a major systematic effort to articulate the meaning of the Christian gospel in terms attuned to the revolutionary ferment in Latin America.

Harvard on China: The apologetics of imperialism

The classic works on modern China—by Harold Isaacs, Edgar Snow, Jack Beiden, even Mao Tse-tung himself—have all led us to believe that the revolutionary ferment which surged through China in the twentieth century was the result of rural impoverishment, economic stagnation and governmental weakness and decay. All of them stressed the crucial role of Western and Japanese imperialism which had reduced China to such a sorry state in the first half of the twentieth century.

An Art in Revolution: Antecedents of Mexican Mural Painting, 1900-1920

In 1920, at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City a series of experiments into the techniques of fresco painting blossomed into a full-blown mural movement that captured and held the American imagination for thirty years. Long before the names of the painters were famous as “revolutionary” artists, however, Mexican art had been in revolutionary ferment. The painters, despite their many individual differences, shared a common rich heritage which made possible the success of the mural movement.The creative outburst which culminated in the Mexican mural movement was dependent upon two oddly dissimilar precedents. The first was the formal academic training most of the painters received at the Academy of San Carlos, the government-supported art school. The second was their participation in a bloody revolution and their assessment of the struggle when peace was restored.