Twentieth Century Research Articles

Streetcars: A Comparative Study between Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Its Various Adaptations by Egyptian Cinema

Abstract This paper probes into the issue of censorship in Egyptian cinema compared to Hollywood during the second half of the twentieth century. It discusses Egyptian censorship regulations and governmental interference in the film industry and their impact on film reception. Conducted over six months, this research specifically investigates three Egyptian film adaptations of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), which are Inhiraf (Aberration) (1985), Alfarisa (Prey) (1986) and Al-Raghba (Desire) (2002). These adaptations are scrutinized through the lens of the Egyptian censorship code and the way these film adaptations may have promoted an Americanization of Arab culture is examined.

Teaching School Genetics in the 2020s: Why "Naive" Mendelian Genetics Has to Go.

Whereas Mendelian genetics is an important research program in the life sciences, its school version is problematic. On the one hand, it contains stereotypical representations of Gregor Mendel's work that misrepresent his findings and the historical context. This deprives students from gaining an authentic picture of how science is done. On the other hand, what most students end up learning in schools are extremely simplistic accounts of heredity, whereby alleles directly control traits and phenotypes, and thus exclusively depend on which allele an individual has. Such oversimplifications of Mendelian genetics as those that we still teach in schools were exploited by ideologues in the beginning of the twentieth century to provide the presumed "scientific" basis for eugenics. This paper addresses these problems of the school version of Mendelian genetics, which I call "naive" Mendelian genetics. It also proposes a shift in school education from teaching how the science of genetics is done using model systems to teaching the complexities of development through which heredity is materialized.

The Rise of the Chocolate Chip Cookie: Kitchens, Cookbooks, and Modernity in the Early Twentieth Century

This thesis explores the rise in popularity of the chocolate chip cookie in the 1930s. It argues this popularity was dually rooted in challenges created by technological innovations of the oven and in the publication of new technical cookbooks written to address those difficulties. In the nineteenth century, kitchen appliances relied upon a present cook to monitor the approximate heat of the oven and progress of a bake using a vague recipe. However, in the twentieth century, ovens came with thermostats and timers, and as a result, recipes grew more exact to match. Unfortunately, home cooks had difficulty updating older recipes to this level of specificity, and they needed to learn new modes of baking. To solve this problem, motherly figures such as Ruth Wakefield published cookbooks that aided struggling home cooks. The popularity of this cookie offers a unique look at how the American cooks dealt with the rapid onset of modernity in the 1920s and 1930s by falling back on a dependable motherly figure offering traditional concepts of baking while embracing new ideas and ingredients. This thesis evidences cookbooks and newspapers to demonstrate these changes within the kitchen itself and elaborate on the pressures faced by home cooks. 

Rethinking the aristocracy in Capetian France, 987–1328

Abstract This introduction explains the context for the following set of six articles. It first considers the meaning and use of the terms ‘France’, ‘Capetian’ and ‘aristocracy’ for historians of the Capetian period of French history (987–1328). It then outlines the historiography of the aristocracy of France in the central Middle Ages. In the second half of the twentieth century, much of the historiography in France concentrated upon holistic studies of regional societies rather than more specific studies of the aristocracy. In recent decades, however, there has been a revival of studies of landowning élites in France, and important work on this topic has long been carried out in other countries as well. The introduction concludes with an overview of the six articles in this collection.

LEXICOGRAPHIC ORGANOLEPTICS: PERCEPTUAL SIGN ‘TASTE’ IN THE DEFINITION OF FRUIT NAMES (BASED ON DICTIONARIES OF DIFFERENT LANGUAGES)

223 definitions of lexemes of the thematic group “Fruits” selected from ten dictionaries of eight different languages were investigated in this article. All researched dictionaries were designed for a wide range of speakers and created in the second half of the twentieth century. The analysis showed that all definitions are specific, despite the fact that they provide information about the same objects perceivable by a human via senses. The task was to identify the peculiarities of using the taste marker when describing a particular fruit in different dictionaries. Two fruits that have the highest marker usage rate for “taste” are date and grapefruit. It can be explained by some deviation from the organoleptic standard (the date is very sweet and the grapefruit is bitter). The tendency towards a significant decrease in the use of the “taste” marker while investigating the group of fruits growing on the territory of the corresponding country was revealed due to the fact that the taste of those fruits is actualized in the speakers' minds and forms a single complex with other perceptual features. The inclusion of the "taste" attribute in the definition can be intuitively perceived as redundant information. Another tendency reflects the increasing use of the “taste” marker in the description of fruits that are not typical for a particular country (territory) and are less likely to occur in the perceptual experience of speakers. The definition is thus a means of constructing meaningful reality in accordance with some trends in the assessment of extra lingual phenomena.

Tawaifs, All India Radio, and the Gendered Politics of Nationalism: Retracing the Tawaifs Against the Emergence of the Twentieth-Century Radio Culture

ABSTRACT This article attempts to historicize the experiences of the Indian courtesans, called the tawaifs, as radio performers against the gendered politics of nationalism, and the consequent subjectification of their music, the problematic positioning of their body and their voice within the emergent radio culture of the twentieth century, from the 1930s to the 1950s. The article problematizes the socio-cultural locale of women performers like the tawaifs within the gender hierarchy integral to nationalist narratives and probes into the centrality of the woman’s body and her sexuality to the discourses of respectability with which the AIR chose to regulate its policies.

Space, Sexuality, and Thornton Wilder’s Villa Rhabani

Abstract Thornton Wilder composed his unfinished play Villa Rhabani—set on the cosmopolitan island of Capri—between 1920 and 1921. This article argues that the play explores the connections between particular spaces and the development of nonnormative sexual identities or practices. It shows how the island setting of Villa Rhabani is crucial to its depiction of queer characters who are associated with both fluid cosmopolitanism and the contestation of sexual binaries. First, Wilder explores how transnational sexual or romantic encounters, cultivated by the shifting cross-cultural exchanges of island life, can produce a flexible attitude to place-based identities. Second, he demonstrates how a mainland–island binary can be used to describe queer identities on the move. His characters’ oscillations between the mainland metropolis of Naples and small-town Capri appear fundamental to the plasticity of their sexual, familial, and national associations. These two dominant modes of portraying character interactions and setting, as well their relation, help reveal the imbricated relationship of space and sexuality. Wilder’s unfinished play, therefore, constitutes a significant contribution to queer transnational literature. The article also contextualizes the play within colonial and Orientalist discourses that have historically linked Southern Italy with same-sex eroticism. While Villa Rhabani draws on a language of exoticization to describe the behaviors of sexually permissive Italian men, it also questions these associations by showing how such practices may be instrumentalized by the economic precarity and desperate social conditions that prevailed in Southern Italy in the early twentieth century.

Death, Burial, and Commemoration in 19th- and Early–20th Century British ‘Lunatic Asylum’ and ‘Mental Hospital’ Cemeteries

Abstract Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, ‘lunatic asylums’ and ‘mental hospitals’ in Britain were legally obliged to provide for the burial of deceased patients whose remains were not reclaimed by relatives or guardians. While burial in local churchyards and cemeteries was idealised in administrative guidance, burial frequently took place in onsite asylum cemeteries instead. Due to their poor historic documentation, these spaces and practices have not been readily foregrounded within existing literature and have received only limited scholarly address. In the present paper, a broad range of documentary and material evidence will be presented, correlated, and thematically arranged, facilitating for the first time a sustained review and interrogation of these spaces and practices. This will contextualise further enquiry into the historic emotional significance of these sites and practices, employing theoretical lenses of ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ in relation to the navigation of grief, memory, and complicated loss. This paper will thereby demonstrate how novel multidisciplinary research methodologies – further to facilitating the reconstruction of understudied spaces and practices in the history of psychiatry – can also be used to gain insight into the emotional histories of marginalised populations of the past, many of whom are under-represented in fragmentary and authoritatively authored historic documentary records.

Let Them Have the Cities: Inflation, Collapse, and Retreat in the Postwar Survivalist West

Abstract Before our contemporary label of “prepper,” and preceding the widespread adoption of “survivalist” in the late 1970s, those who sought self-sufficiency and security in remote locales of the American continent were known as “retreaters.” Anticipating catastrophes—chiefly hyperinflation, nuclear war, and urban chaos—violent enough to rend the social fabric of an increasingly decadent United States, these retreaters fled the swelling cities for the imagined security of the rural West to ride out the impending apocalypse. This article argues that one of the most salient and overlooked prime movers of the survivalist movement was a pervasive economic anxiety, metastasizing with the rampant stagflation of the 1970s. Drawing, for the first time, on twenty-five years of survivalist books, pamphlets, and newsletters, this paper shows that the secular eschatology of survivalism demands study if historians are to attain a clearer picture of the intellectual heritage of radical right millenarian visions from the late twentieth century up to the present day.

ЛЮДСЬКИЙ КАПІТАЛ В КОНЦЕПЦІЇ ВІДКРИТОЇ НАУКИ

Introduction. Any economic system's development is only possible with capital participation. Over several centuries, a stable concept has emerged that considers human capital as an essential source of investment for innovation, scientific and technological progress, and the stable development of the state. At the same time, the practical realization of this concept is associated with such categories as education, science, healthcare, competencies, skills, professional abilities of employees, intellectual output, etc. The purpose of the article: The aim is to comprehensively investigate the innovative potential of human capital from the perspective of a driving force for progress in the knowledge age. Methods: Modern science is based on openness and accessibility as tools of scientific search and research. Human capital is an essential element of this search, expressed in intellectual abilities, self-development, and theoretical and practical generalizations. The basis for more profound research and generalizations is the study of internal and external influences on the formation of human capital and the definition of its role in the scientific sense. Results: Analyzing human capital through the prism of its structural formation, it is worth noting that its meaning has changed in different periods. In the twentieth century, when the economy was formed in the context of industrial development, human capital was focused on technological excellence and ingenuity. In the 21st century, economic development is dominated by the intellectual and scientific component, which is the basis for the functioning of the national system. Therefore, human capital in this period is gaining new meaning as a knowledge economy. In forming the country's national economy, the intangible form of capital is becoming increasingly important, where human resource is the basis of socio-economic development. Conclusions. As a result of the theoretical analysis of existing approaches and new proposals, the innovative economic development model is developing dynamically. Human (intellectual) capital is prioritized in this model, stimulating informatization and introducing modern scientific and technological innovations. Human capital is a complex phenomenon that adapts to modern innovative and technological changes and acts as an organizational motivator for achieving a high level of industrialization and a civilized environment.

Writing Life, Writing Time, Writing the Mother

This article focuses on Ernaux’s later life memories of a twentieth century daughter-mother relationship, rendered in the light of this era’s historical transformations and its tensions between individual freedom and collective "fate," and between pre- and post 1968 conceptions of a fulfilled life. It refers to Ernaux’s most monumental work of self-writing, Les Années (2008) and this book’s links to what she has previously written in remembrance of her mother. The purpose is to investigate how these works seek to come to terms with, not only the loss of a mother, but also the narrator’s own aging. Ernaux exemplifies the adult daughter-senescent mother relationship in ways that are characteristic for her generation of women and suggestive of general historical changes in human relationships in Western societies since 1968. Can Ernaux’s writing provide, in the terms of Kathleen Woodward, “cultural models of older women as a way of generating alternative futures for ourselves”? Or does it fail to reconciliate the stereotypical binary of female aging as either graceful or awful, conveying tabooed aspects of old age that need to be brought to light, and even more urgently so in a socio-cultural context privileging youthfulness, individualism and uncertain human bonds? Keywords: Annie Ernaux, The Years; aging daughter-mother relationship; filiation narratives; auto-socio-biography; memory and time; autonomy and dependency; social exclusion; abjection and purification.

Segregation in the Reserves: The Winter Family in Sekhukhuneland 1913–1948

ABSTRACT The role of the reserve areas in both the genesis and implementation of segregation and apartheid is an especially well-worn topic in South African historiography. But much less attention has been given to the impact of the implementation of racial segregation in society in the areas set aside as rural locations and reserves in the ninteeenth and early twentieth centuries. The experiences of the Winter family of the Sekhukhuneland area provides an illuminating case study of the processes at work in the interregnum between the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts. Their family history highlights the emergence in reserve areas of networks of interconnected families spanning both old and new elites and the racial boundaries a segregationist ideology sought to entrench. It also shows how rapidly, profoundly, and painfully these emergent social forms were dismembered after 1936, long before the enforcement of apartheid policies after 1948.

Western Anthelmintics in Early Twentieth-Century China Colonial Practices and Knowledge on "Tropical Diseases" of the In/between.

Protestant (medical) missionaries were the main proponents of Western medicine in China after the Opium Wars. Several studies have highlighted how they used spectacular surgery as a means of gaining public trust. As well as surgery, they also administered anthelmintic drugs such as santonin as a tool of persuasion and conversion. Many anthelmintic drugs of the European materia medica had a colonial history. My paper analyses how coloniality materialised in medical practice and anthelmintics in China. For the late nineteenth century, I will examine the colonial practices in which the drug santonin was involved. At the time, santonin was the drug of choice for treating roundworm. In the early twentieth century, medical missionaries became involved in parasitological research on parasitic worms such as hookworm and Fasciolopsis buski. For this period, I will explore how new knowledge about anthelmintics emerged in the scattered knowledge space of China, and how it related to colonialism and imperialism.

Ukrainian Waste for the Soviet Economy: Shaping the National Narrative

The environmental history of Ukraine in the twentieth century is replete with various and still understudied facets. However, contemporary research predominantly employs imperial narratives, which elucidate it through the prism of Soviet history, depriving it of subjectivity and the uniqueness of the local context. This essay proposes an alternative approach. Through the example of waste recycling in the Ukrainian SSR, which was one of the Soviet republics from 1922 to 1991, we aim to demonstrate the importance of reinterpreting its environmental history by studying multi-vector centre–periphery relations in the Soviet Union. This case seeks to demonstrate not only the formation in the 1920s of Soviet colonial practices of resource extraction, including that of waste, from the periphery – the Soviet republics – but also attempts to resist these in the first decade of the Soviet totalitarian regime’s formation. This essay is based on documents from Ukrainian archives, which are introduced into scholarly circulation for the first time, and on statistical collections of documents from the USSR.

“The Age of Malice”: Estupro, Consent, and the Foundations of Victim Blaming in the Criminal Courts of Buenos Aires, 1853–1878

This article examines the judicial treatment of pubescent, female victims of sexual assault in Buenos Aires, Argentina, between 1853 and 1878, dates that span the decades between the national constitution and the adoption by Buenos Aires Province of new penal legislation. Centering the case of 13-year-old Irene Mestosini, it analyzes the prosecution of estupro cases through the paradigm of rape culture and victim blaming. It exposes how, by casting pubescent girls as malicious because of their physical and mental development, authorities blamed them for their assault while dismissing men's aggressive sexuality. By illustrating the ways in which physiological development worked alongside legal cultures, class expectations, and heteronormative gender norms to create a culture of impunity around sexual assault, this article suggests that modern notions of acceptable and unacceptable sexuality emerged in Buenos Aires earlier than in other parts of Latin America, where honor remained a central concern well into the twentieth century.

Music Reviews

Abstract: This article reviews the following four works by song composers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, two of whom created or finished their works during the COVID pandemic; Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (1952–2023), Saarikoski Songs for Voice and Piano ; Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Songs for Lena (Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries) ; and Evan Fein’s “The Solitary Reaper,” and Songs of the Open Road , for mezzo-soprano, clarinet in B♭ and piano.

Colonial Exiles: The Tambora Volcanic Explosion, Environmental History, and Swiss Immigration to Nova Friburgo, Brazil, 1815–1821

The 1815 eruption of the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora triggered a subsistence crisis in Europe, especially in Switzerland. This article retraces the founding of Nova Friburgo, a colony in the mountains near Rio de Janeiro composed of several hundred Swiss families, mostly from the rural canton of Fribourg. This study shows how the unusual central European settler migration to the Brazilian tropics was facilitated by a new class of entrepreneurial go-betweens, acting as dynamic mediators between the effects that the climatic catastrophe caused by Tambora had on Swiss agriculture and politics and the development requirements for building new settlements in a metamorphosing South American continent. By positioning Brazil in the broader environmental history of Tambora, as well as the fallout from the Napoleonic Wars, this article sheds light on how the study of climatic teleconnections requires multiple scales of analysis to understand better how the different politics and scopes of action, and sets of unlikely processes, move into play. These teleconnections were, in fact, socially mediated with eventually wide-reaching social and racial transformations that became foundational prototypes for Brazilian land colonization throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.

Philosophical and Moral Issues of Organ Transplantation at the Close of the Twentieth Century.

Editor's note: Organ transplantation and the associated ethical topics such as the criteria for brain death continue to be of critical interest to Catholics, both physician and lay. Thirty years ago, Fr. Joseph Howard took a look at the philosophical and moral aspects of organ transplantation, and his words are still relevant today. New, recent insights into the residual functioning of the brain in the face of extensive injuries pose an additional question for Catholic physicians: to what extent do we owe a duty to our patients to explain to them the nature of the uncertainties and debates surrounding both donation and transplantation, in order for them to make an informed decision for themselves or their loved ones? Linacre Quarterly. 1994 Nov;61(4):57-64.

Peculiarities of advertising communications in the press of Transcarpathia in the Austria-Hungarian period at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century

The article investigates the specific features of advertising development in the Transcarpathian press at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. This study examined how social, historical, cultural, and economic factors influenced the development of advertising in the media of a region that used to be a part of Austria-Hungary. The study revealed the specific characteristics of advertisements in the region's first vernacular language magazines: the newspapers, «Nauka», «Selo» «Nedilya». Press editors were fully aware of the psychology of consumer influence and the techniques of making advertising messages relevant. Thus, various commercial information visualization methods are widely used: manipulative techniques, free offers, hidden and native advertising, etc. They advertised church books, musical instruments, bells, medicines, medical services, printed materials, textbooks, artwork, agricultural machinery, produce, fertilizers, etc. At the same time, information about the advertised product, the names of companies or manufacturers, and the address of production or sale were emphasized graphically. This demonstrated an understanding of the psychology of the audience's perception of information about goods or services. There were constant appeals to support the newspaper financially, to subscribe to the magazine, and self-promotion. The successful fundraising by the Nauka editorial board for its own printing house, Unio, was evidence of productive communication with readers. The editors understood the importance of illustrative presentation of information, so they used a wide range of graphic design of texts, fonts, drawings, engravings, photographs, and colored paper. At the same time, the advertisements concerned limited types of goods and represented a small part of local producers. However, the limited variety of advertised products indicates a weak advertising market and underdeveloped entrepreneurship in the region. Advertising serves as a unique identifier of the complex economic, social, and cultural situation of the Rusyns-Ukrainians in Transcarpathia during that period, making it relevant for further research into the development of media during this period in general.

Recoding of a society

The undercarriage of Afrikaner nationalist mobilisation was assembled by a small group of language engineers during the opening decades of the twentieth century. Particularly influential within this broad literary project were the Afrikaans clerics who clustered around the Zuid-Afrikaanse Bijbel Vereniging (ZABV, later N.G. Kerk Uitgewers van Suid-Afrika), the official publishing wing of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC). Propped up by this platform, DRC writers contributed to the linguistic shape of Afrikaans and crucially steered the affixed matter of nation building along a defined religious route in the image of a Christian-National Afrikanerdom. By the start of 1940 a sociological function within the operation of the ZABV lent itself to the nationalist agenda of capturing the consciousness of Afrikaner society. This notably contributed to the creation of an indoctrinated and self-concealed Afrikaner bloc based on the perpetuated myth of an unquestioned and divinely affirmed national uniqueness.