scholarly journals Mythos of the North Pole: The Top of the World

Nordlit ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susi K. Frank

<p align="LEFT">Not a few early twentieth-century cultural histories conceive of the development of humanity in modern times as a northward shift of the civilizational centre. In this thinking, they transform into narrative and geography the static image of a cosmos constructed along one axis of the globe, based on the Christian story of salvation. In this notion of the cosmos, with its upward-oriented vertical axis understood as a sign of hierarchical order, these histories refer back to a global symbolic legacy with origins in the cosmologies of very different cultures: the idea of the world as a mountain, the world with a mountain and a summit at its centre. In my article I trace the history of this image and its visualization from European antiquity onto the peak of heroic modernism in the first half of the twentieth century. In conclusion I ask what kind of transformation this image underwent to survive in our (still) post-heroic times.</p>

Author(s):  
Giuliano Garavini

The Introduction deals with the place of sovereign landlords, in particular landlords that ruled over some of the most productive oil regions in the world, in the history of the twentieth century. Petrostates are often disliked because of their “rentier state” status. They have the aura of a “pariah state” compared to the other “productive” members of the international community. Land rent has been progressively marginalized as a topic of mainstream political economy thinking, and has generally negative connotations for Liberal and Marxist intellectuals and economists alike. The general dislike for rent as “undeserved wealth” lies very deep in widely engrained religious and cultural views all over the world. Variations of the biblical admonition that “if anyone is not willing to work, neither should he eat” exist so many different cultures. This book holds no such prejudice against land rent and sovereign landlords. It simply observes that land rent exists because the Earth is finite and because much of the ecosphere has been split up in the twentieth century among sovereign landlords called nation states. Each of these nation states has peculiar geographical and cultural characteristics and has to deal with them. The existence of petrostates such as Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Iran, nation states with such an important regional and global role, while at the same time crucially dependent on international land rent (a rent that comes from exports), cannot be easily dismissed as the outcome of a quirk of international political economy that has generated extravagant regimes.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-78
Author(s):  
Venelin Terziev ◽  
Marin Georgiev

The subject of this article is the genesis of the professional culture of personnel management. The last decades of the 20th century were marked by various revolutions - scientific, technical, democratic, informational, sexual, etc. Their cumulative effect has been mostly reflected in the professional revolution that shapes the professional society around the world. This social revolution has global consequences. In addition to its extensive parameters, it also has intensive ones related to the deeply-rooted structural changes in the ways of working and thinking, as well as in the forms of its social organization. The professional revolutions in the history of Modern Times stem from this theory.Employees’ awareness and accountability shall be strengthened. The leader must be able to formulate and bring closer to the employees the vision of the organization and its future goal, to which all shall aspire. He should pay attention not to the "letter" but to the "spirit" of this approach.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shohei Sato

AbstractThis article re-examines our understanding of modern sport. Today, various physical cultures across the world are practised under the name of sport. Almost all of these sports originated in the West and expanded to the rest of the world. However, the history of judo confounds the diffusionist model. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a Japanese educationalist amalgamated different martial arts and established judo not as a sport but as ‘a way of life’. Today it is practised globally as an Olympic sport. Focusing on the changes in its rules during this period, this article demonstrates that the globalization of judo was accompanied by a constant evolution of its character. The overall ‘sportification’ of judo took place not as a diffusion but as a convergence – a point that is pertinent to the understanding of the global sportification of physical cultures, and also the standardization of cultures in modern times.


2021 ◽  

The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines the heights of American global power in the mid-twentieth century and how challenges from at home and abroad altered the United States and its role in the world. The second half of the twentieth century marked the pinnacle of American global power in economic, political, and cultural terms, but even as it reached such heights, the United States quickly faced new challenges to its power, originating both domestically and internationally. Highlighting cutting-edge ideas from scholars from all over the world, this volume anatomizes American power as well as the counters and alternatives to 'the American empire.' Topics include US economic and military power, American culture overseas, human rights and humanitarianism, third-world internationalism, immigration, communications technology, and the Anthropocene.


1998 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatrice Forbes Manz

Temür has been many things to many people. He was nomad and city-builder, Turk and promoter of Persian culture, restorer of the Mongol order and warrior for the spread of Islam. One thing he was to all: a conqueror of unequalled scope, able to subdue both the vast areas of nomad power to the north and the centres of agrarian Islamic culture to the south. The history of his successors was one of increasing political fragmentation and economic stress. Yet they too won fame, as patrons over a period of brilliant cultural achievement in Persian and Turkic. Temür's career raises a number of questions. Why did he find it necessary to pile conquest upon conquest, each more ambitious than the last? Having conceived dreams of dominion, where did he get the power and money to fulfill them? When he died, what legacy did Temür leave to his successors and to the world which they tried to control? Finally, what was this world of Turk and Persian, and where did Temür and the Timurids belong within it?


2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 785-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tara Zahra

“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.


2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-293
Author(s):  
Johannes Klare

André Martinet holds an important position in the history of linguistics in the twentieth century. For more than six decades he decisively influenced the development of linguistics in France and in the world. He is one of the spokespersons for French linguistic structuralism, the structuralisme fonctionnel. The article focuses on a description and critical appreciation of the interlinguistic part of Martinet’s work. The issue of auxiliary languages and hence interlinguistics had interested Martinet greatly from his youth and provoked him to examine the matter actively. From 1946 onwards he worked in New York as a professor at Columbia University and a research director of the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). From 1934 he was in contact with the Danish linguist and interlinguist Otto Jespersen (1860–1943). Martinet, who went back to Paris in 1955 to work as a professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Sorbonne), increasingly developed into an expert in planned languages; for his whole life, he was committed to the world-wide use of a foreign language that can be learned equally easily by members of all ethnic groups; Esperanto, functioning since 1887, seemed a good option to him.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Thomas Waters

This chapter shows that the history of black magic in modern times is a cosmopolitan drama. Human movement rapidly accelerated from the nineteenth century. People, goods, technologies, and ideas began crossing the earth at a dizzying rate. Travellers took their magical beliefs abroad and encountered new mysticisms when they got there. Empires regulated their colonial subjects in all sorts of ways, including how they dealt with witches. Witchcraft became more international, though at the same time it remained fundamentally rooted in local circumstances. This means that, to understand modern witchcraft, one must combine a global orientation with a local focus. And an excellent place for that local focus is a large island, lying on the eastern edge of the North Atlantic Ocean: Britain.


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