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Focaal ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 (72) ◽  
pp. 95-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eeva Kesküla
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Class Formation ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Term Analysis

In this article, I look at Russian-speaking miners' perception of their position in Estonian society, along with their moral economy. Former heroes, glorified for their class and ethnicity, they feel like a racialized underclass in neoliberal Estonia. Excluded from the nation on the basis of ethnicity, they try to maintain their dignity through the discourse of hard work as a basis for membership in society. Based on the longer-term analysis of Estonian history, I argue that the current outcome for the Russian-speaking working class is related to longer historical processes of class formation whereby each period in the Estonian history of the twentieth century seems to be the reversal of the previous one. I also argue for analysis of social change in Eastern Europe that does not focus solely on ethnicity but is linked to class formation processes.

The History of ‘the Reading Public’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Reading Matter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Victorian Periodicals

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.

Going West

2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 785-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tara Zahra
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
European History ◽  
East European ◽  
European Context ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

“Going West” explores the potential of integrating East European History into broader histories of Europe and the world. Placing the history of Eastern Europe in a European context, I argue, may enable us to challenge the tropes of backwardness, pathology, and violence that still dominate the field. I also suggest that historians explore the extent to which conceptions of minority rights, development, and humanitarianism first developed in Eastern Europe radiated beyond the region in the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Households of the Nobles and Peasants in Užventis Parish, 1836–1861

Lituanistica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurynas Giedrimas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Household Model ◽  
History Of ◽  
Household Models ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Household Analysis ◽  
Nuclear Household

The article deals with the households of the nobles and peasants in the first half of the nineteenth century in Užventis parish, Samogitia. In the middle of the twentieth century, John Hajnal and Peter Laslett started researching the history of resident households. The researchers formulated theoretical and methodological foundations for household analysis and encouraged other historians and demographers to undertake similar studies. The researchers who analysed the households of Central and Eastern Europe either refuted or corrected many of the statements proposed by John Hajnal and Peter Laslett and established that the most common household in Central and Eastern Europe was a nuclear household, although in many cases it was also possible to find an extended household. However, it was not clarified at what age people started building new households and which household model dominated in Samogitia. Also, it was not known what the difference between a household of nobles and a household of peasants was. The data on the households of the nobles and peasants also interconnected. The households of landlords were bigger than the households of peasants and the petty nobility, because the menage of a landlord used to be part of the household. After analysing the aforementioned data, it has been discovered that in the first half of the nineteenth century, nuclear household dominated Užventis parish. Extended household models were often found as well. The Catholic inhabitants of Užventis parish married late and had a child every two years. Around 3500 Catholic residents lived in Užventis parish in the first half of the nineteenth century. The analysis of the data showed that nuclear household dominated the Užventis parish in the first half of the nineteenth century.

This Is Not a Game

2018 ◽  
pp. 51-82
Author(s):  
Daniel Renfrew
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lead Poisoning ◽  
Import Substitution ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Socioeconomic Crisis

This chapter argues that lead poisoning acted as a metonym of a general social imaginary of crisis associated with the collapse of the neoliberal model while also being rooted in the legacies of the mid-twentieth-century Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) period. The chapter counters Uruguay’s modern foundational myths of “exceptionalism” with social imaginaries anchored in the militant working-class history of La Teja. The chapter critically examines these foundational myths in relation to the all-encompassing socioeconomic crisis that began in 2002, arguing that activists interpreted the lead-poisoning epidemic within the working-class counter-narrative of Uruguayan national identity and history, politics and society, and in dialogue with a counter-imaginary of crisis linked to the material and symbolic fallout of the neoliberal order.

3. The history of political thought and Marxism

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-50
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Scientific Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Friedrich Engels

‘The history of political thought and Marxism’ focuses on Marxism, which became the most global and scientific philosophy in the twentieth century. An important figure here is Karl Marx, the outcast from Prussian Trier that famously contributed to the science of historical materialism. Marx’s The Condition of the Working Class in England justified revolution through a philosophy that emerged from reading European history. Marx, along with Friedrich Engels, accepted that the progress of commerce by the end of the eighteenth century made European states more powerful than others in history. Marx’s contemporaries believed that the study of societies in every stage of history is vital in understanding the future.

“The Hora Staccato in Swing!”: Jascha Heifetz's Musical Eclecticism and the Adaptation of Violin Miniatures

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-431
Author(s):  
JOSHUA S. WALDEN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Tin Pan Alley ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
History Of

AbstractJascha Heifetz (1901–87) promoted a modern brand of musical eclecticism, recording, performing, and editing adaptations of folk and popular songs while remaining dedicated to the standard violin repertoire and the compositions of his contemporaries. This essay examines the complex influences of his displacement from Eastern Europe and assimilation to the culture of the United States on both the hybridity of his repertoire and the critical reception he received in his new home. It takes as its case study Heifetz's composition of the virtuosic showpiece “Hora Staccato,” based on a Romany violin performance he heard in Bucharest, and his later adaptation of the music into an American swing hit he titled “Hora Swing-cato.” Finally, the essay turns to the field of popular song to consider how two of the works Heifetz performed most frequently were adapted for New York Yiddish radio as Tin Pan Alley–style songs whose lyrics narrate the early twentieth-century immigrant experience. The performance and arrangement history of many of Heifetz's miniatures reveals the multivalent ways in which works in his repertoire, and for some listeners Heifetz himself, were reinterpreted, adapted, and assimilated into American culture.

Red History, Blue Mood: Labor History and Solidarity in an Age of Fragmentation

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Jefferson Cowie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Formation ◽  
Political Fragmentation ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Control ◽  
Class Community

Beginning with labor historians’ efforts to create a synthesis of the field in the 1980s, this essay explores the problem of working-class political fragmentation and the intellectual problems that posed for the generation of “new” labor historians. Looking to culture, class, community, and control as their themes, historians overlooked deeper problems in American class formation as well as the monumental complexity of discussing the history of class in the United States.

scholarly journals Experiences in Common: Slavery and “Freedom” in the Process of Rio de Janeiro’s Working-Class Formation (1850–1910)

2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Badaró Mattos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Class Formation ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Work And Life

SummaryThe present article is based on research into the process of working-class formation in Rio de Janeiro in the period between the end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. It explores the significant shared experiences of workers subjected to slavery and “free” workers in the process of working-class formation, and aims to demonstrate that the history of that process in Brazil began while slavery still existed, and that through shared work and life experience in Rio de Janeiro, as in other Brazilian cities where slavery was strong during the nineteenth century, enslaved and “free” workers shared forms of organization and struggle, founding common values and expectations that were to have a central importance in later periods of class formation.

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