scholarly journals ‘“The whistle blows, and we are whisked into a tunnel”: Railways and the Environment in Illawarra, 1850s–1915’

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-152
Author(s):  
André Brett ◽  

Historians are becoming alert to the large role of railways in environmental history. To date, many studies in Australasia focus on a specific industry, such as timber. It is now worth turning to the distinctive local or regional effects of railways beyond a single industry or commodity, so to better understand the links between technology, environment, and place. Illawarra presents a valuable case study. The environmental history of the first decades of rail transport exposes how Wollongong and its region industrialised and the ways in which this process affected everything from primary producers to the sounds of daily life. This article takes in the 1850s through to the start of World War I (WWI), a period when rail transport grew from being the adjunct of a few coal mines into an essential common carrier. It progresses through a series of themes that show the economic, social, and cultural attributes that shaped and were shaped by the railway environment. It begins with the railway as a carrier: the extent to which trains fulfilled their intended role to transport Illawarra’s natural resources to Sydney and other markets. It then moves on to the railway as a consumer, putting the local environment to work for its benefit and requiring materials made from resources of distant lands. Railways did more than carry or consume resources; they created their own environment and provided new perspectives on nature. Trains brought people closer to nature, carried them into new—and dangerous—environments in tunnels, and transformed the sonic landscape. Rail travel differed significantly to horseback or sea voyages in capacity and speed, and by WWI it was enmeshed in Illawarra’s environment.

Author(s):  
Odile Moreau

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Robert Nemes

Abstract Hungary has a long, rich history of wine production. Historians have emphasized wine's importance to the development of both the Hungarian economy and Hungarian nationalism. This article ties together these historiographical threads through a case study of a small village in one of Hungary's most famous wine regions. Tracing the village's history from the 1860s to World War I, the article makes three main claims. First, it demonstrates that from the start, this remote village belonged to wider networks of trade and exchange that stretched across the surrounding region, state, and continent. Second, it shows that even as Magyar elites celebrated the folk culture and peasant smallholders of this region, they also cheered the introduction of what they saw as scientific, rational agriculture. This leads to the last argument: wine achieved its place in the pantheon of Hungarian culture at a moment when the local communities that had grown up around its production and stirred the national imagination were undergoing dramatic and irreversible change.


2021 ◽  
pp. 73-110
Author(s):  
Gojko Barjamovic

The history of empire begins in Western Asia. This chapter tracks developments in the second and first millennia BCE as imperial control in the region became increasingly common and progressively more pervasive. Oscillations between political fragmentation and imperial unification swung gradually toward the latter, from just a few documented examples in the third millennium BCE to the more-or-less permanent partition of Western Asia into successive imperial states from the seventh century BCE until the end of World War I. The chapter covers about a dozen empires and empire-like states, tracing developments of territoriality and notions of imperial universality using Assyria ca. 2004–605 BCE as a case study for how large and loose hegemonies became the normative political formation in the region.


2021 ◽  
pp. 268-287
Author(s):  
Helen Roche

Following Austria’s annexation by the Third Reich, the NPEA authorities were eager to pursue every opportunity to found new Napolas in the freshly acquired territories of the ‘Ostmark’. In the first instance, the Inspectorate took over the existing state boarding schools (Bundeserziehungsanstalten/Staatserziehungsanstalten) at Wien-Breitensee, Wien-Boerhavegasse, Traiskirchen, and the Theresianum. Secondly, beyond Vienna, numerous Napolas were also founded in the buildings of monastic foundations which had been requisitioned and expropriated by the Nazi security services. These included the abbey complexes at Göttweig, Lambach, Seckau, Vorau, and St. Paul (Spanheim), as well as the Catholic seminary at St. Veit (present-day Ljubljana-Šentvid, Slovenia). This chapter begins by charting the chequered history of the former imperial and royal (k.u.k.) cadet schools in Vienna, which were refashioned into civilian Bundeserziehungsanstalten by the Austrian socialist educational reformer Otto Glöckel immediately after World War I. During the reign of Dollfuß and Schuschnigg’s Austrofascist state, the schools were threatened from within by the terrorist activity of illegal Hitler Youth cells, and the Anschluss was ultimately welcomed by many pupils, staff, and administrators. August Heißmeyer and Otto Calliebe’s subsequent efforts to reform the schools into Napolas led to their being incorporated into the NPEA system on 13 March 1939. The chapter then treats the Inspectorate’s foundation of further Napolas in expropriated religious buildings, focusing on NPEA St. Veit as a case study. In conclusion, it outlines the ways in which both of these forms of Napolisation conformed to broader patterns of Nazification policy in Austria after the Anschluss.


2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 210-218
Author(s):  
Дмитрий Морозов ◽  
Dmitriy Morozov

This article describes the process of preservation and beautification of military cemeteries and memorials of World War I on the territory of Western Belarus in 1921-1939. Aspects of cooperation between state bodies and public organizations are discussed. The author relies on the legislative acts and periodicals of that period, as well as modern literature and Web-sites of specialized public organizations. The article considers the main legislative acts that manage activities for protection and arrangement of sites of memory of World War I. The questions of the relation of the different people to memory of the victims of Great World are raised; examples of particular actions for its preservation on the territory of the Western Belarus in 1921-1939 are given. The author determines the role of World War I in the history of Belarus and its heritage. The article contains information about key battles on Eastern front, and also about features of burial of soldiers of the Imperial Russian Army. The special attention is paid to joint military burials where Russian and German soldiers were buried and which are symbols of posthumous reconciliation of hostile sides. Various ways integration of sites of memory of Great War´s to modern military patriotic routes, which are urged to inform new generations about this grandiose conflict of the XX century, are considered.


2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle J. Anderson

AbstractIn this article, I detail the British imperial system of human resource mobilization that recruited workers and peasants from Egypt to serve in the Egyptian Labor Corps in World War I (1914–18). By reconstructing multiple iterations of this network and analyzing the ways that workers and peasants acted within its constraints, this article provides a case study in the relationship between the Anglo-Egyptian colonial state and rural society in Egypt. Rather than seeing these as two separate, autonomous, and mutually antagonistic entities, this history of Egyptian Labor Corps recruitment demonstrates their mutual interdependence, emphasizing the dialectical relationship between state power and political subjectivity.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
O. W. Saarinen

Kapuskasing, Ontario warrants special mention in the history of Canadian land use planning. The town first acquired special prominence immediately following World War I when it was the site of the first provincially-planned resource community in Canada. The early layout of the settlement reflected the imprints of both the "city beautiful" and "garden city" movements. After 1958, the resource community then became the focus for an important experiment in urban "fringe" rehabilitation at Brunetville, a suburban area situated just east of the planned Kapuskasing townsite. The author suggests that the role of the Brunetville experiment in helping to change the focus of urban renewal in Canada from redevelopment to rehabilitation has not been fully appreciated.


2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-83
Author(s):  
Seyyed Alireza Golshani ◽  
Mohammad Ebrahim Zohalinezhad ◽  
Mohammad Hossein Taghrir ◽  
Sedigheh Ghasempoor ◽  
Alireza Salehi

The Spanish Flu was one of the disasters in the history of Iran, especially Southern Iran, which led to the death of a significant number of people in Iran. It started on October 29, 1917, and lasted till 1920 – a disaster that we can claim changed the history. In one of the First World War battlefields in southern Iran in 1918, there was nothing left until the end of World War I and when the battle between Iranian warriors (especially people of Dashtestan and Tangestan in Bushehr, Arabs, and people of Bakhtiari in Khuzestan and people of Kazerun and Qashqai in Fars) and British forces had reached its peak. As each second encouraged the triumph for the Iranians, a flu outbreak among Iranian warriors led to many deaths and, as a result, military withdrawal. The flu outbreak in Kazerun, Firoozabad, Farshband, Abadeh, and even in Shiraz changed the end of the war. In this article, we attempt to discuss the role of the Spanish flu outbreak at the end of one of the forefronts of World War I.


2015 ◽  
pp. 85-100
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Wrzesińska

National megalomania in Polish reflection in the early 20th centuryIn the early 20th century, a number of Polish thinkers betrayed a mentality in which was deeply rooted the notion of the Polish nation’s unique character. These thinkers also expressed a conviction that Poles had a special mission both in Europe in general and towards other European nations. The signs of the intellectual elite’s national megalomania were reflected in Polish journalistic writings in the final period of World War I and the initial period of regained independence shortly after it.The article analyzes the views of selected thinkers: the philosopher W. Lutosławski, the journalist and literary critic A. Górski, the publicist A. Chołoniewski, and the historian J.K. Kochanowski. All of them believed in an optimistic picture of Polish history and emphasized the significance of the Polish mission in an ethical dimension understood as a desire to establish European order based both on respect towards the individual and at the same time on national diversity. This attitude was clearly based on Romantic thought – a historiosophy tinted with mesianism. All these authors dealt with the same themes from Polish history, treating them as a justification of their attitudes (such as: the Republic of Nobility as an embodiment of the ideal of freedom, Poland as an intermediary between the East and the West, as well as the propagator of Christian civilization in the East; the prominent role of Poles among the Slavic peoples, the importance of Catholicism). All in all, they created a mythologized vision of the Polish Republic in order to integrate the Polish society and mobilize it to act. This stream of glorification of the Polish statehood met with severe criticism after Poland regained its independence. S. Zakrzewski, F. Bujak, J.S. Bystroń, Bocheński brothers and others protested against falsifying the history of Poland.


2020 ◽  
Vol 97 (3) ◽  
pp. 3-36
Author(s):  
Diane M. T. North

The 1918–1920 influenza pandemic remains the deadliest influenza pandemic in recorded history. It started in the midst of World War I and killed an estimated 50–100 million people worldwide, many from complications of pneumonia. Approximately 500 million, or one-third of the world's population, became infected. In the United States, an estimated 850,000 died. The exceptionally contagious, unknown strain of influenza virus spread rapidly and attacked all ages, but it especially targeted young adults (ages twenty to forty-four). This essay examines the evolution of four waves of the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic, emphasizes the role of the U.S. Navy and sea travel as the initial transmitters of the virus in the United States, and focuses on California communities and military installations as a case study in the response to the crisis. Although the world war, limited medical science, and the unknown nature of the virus made it extremely difficult to fight the disease, the responses of national, state, and community leaders to the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic can provide useful lessons in 2020, as the onslaught of COVID-19 forces people worldwide to confront a terrible illness and death.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document