{"title":"Sound in Amsterdam During the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries","authors":"An Jacobs","doi":"10.18352/hcm.571","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18352/hcm.571","url":null,"abstract":"This paper deals with sound as part of everyday urban life, based on Amsterdam during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although it is commonly held that modern cities have grown noisier as a result of their expansion and the growth of industry and technology, we actually know very little about the urban sounds of the past. We know even less about the manner in which it was perceived and valued by contemporaries. This article poses three questions. Which sounds were produced in Amsterdam in the past? Which meanings did contemporaries attribute to these sounds? And which the role did particular sounds play in the debate on city life? To answer these questions, the article makes use of an analytical framework that allows us to look at soundscapes from the point of view of the ecology of sound, the semiotics of sound and the politics of sound.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132493466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Bentham to Guadet: ‘Auditory Visibility’ in Nineteenth-Century Theories on Government Offices","authors":"J. V. Maele","doi":"10.18352/hcm.577","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18352/hcm.577","url":null,"abstract":"Architectural historiography is seldom concerned with the antithetical notions of ‘noise’ and ‘silence’. In this case study, I tentatively explore the theme in the context of nineteenth-century administrative buildings. More particularly, I investigate the normative views of British and French authors concerning acoustic perception in one subtype of ‘bureaucratic’ architecture: the ministerial office building. Drawing examples from the work of, among others, ‘panopticon’ theorist Jeremy Bentham and the architect Julien Guadet, I point at the centrality of ‘sound control’ or ‘sound management’ in architectural discourses on office buildings. In the specific domain of ministerial offices, moreover, these discourses were rife with ideological views on the nature and the functioning of government itself.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"9 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114115006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Urban Progress as Noise: a Commentary","authors":"M. Kytö","doi":"10.18352/hcm.567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18352/hcm.567","url":null,"abstract":"This essay is a commentary on the essays of Annelies Jacobs, Nimrod Ben Zeev and Jens van de Maele. These pieces tackle the theme of urbanization and noise as three separate but intertwined discussions: unwanted sounds in Amsterdam cityscape, loud working conditions in Palestinian limekilns and ‘auditory visibility’ in offices in Britain and France. Reading the texts in resonance with the aesthetic ponderings of the futurists, one can hear the early-twentieth-century discussions of noise in two ways. Noise was something that needed regulation but at the same time it was the inescapable sign of the modern. Noise as ‘nonmusical sound’ turns into noise as a disturbance in the system of acoustic communication and into noise as the presence of power, technology and the masses in the urban landscape.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130192056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Sound of Danger: Voice, Noise and Risk in Building Material Production in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine","authors":"Nimrod Ben Zeev","doi":"10.18352/hcm.566","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18352/hcm.566","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers an analysis of the vernacular auditory cultures of safety and risk in construction material production in early twentieth-century Palestine. It examines the qualitatively different understandings and uses of sounds, from workers’ singing to heavy machinery, which characterized dangerous work in Palestine’s rural limekilns and its then sole industrial cement factory. The article suggests that in order to understand the ‘sound of modernity,’ we need to expand the geographic and thematic scope of our studies: looking beyond those for which sound became obsession or profession and the cultural sensibilities of elites, and incorporating the ways in which indigenous and colonial working classes in the colonized world made sense and use of the auditory.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"2016 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114455320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Embodying the American Century: The Long-Lasting U.S. Military Presence in Europe and the Case of Schinnen","authors":"D. Fazzi","doi":"10.18352/hcm.578","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18352/hcm.578","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars have interpreted the American global web of military bases as both outposts of empire and beacons of freedom. In Europe, in particular, U.S. military deployment has been quite exceptional: since the end of World War II, American bases have mushroomed and grown steadily all over the continent. Originally meant to keep Western Europe from totalitarianism, embed it in a system of collective, transatlantic security, and tie it firmly to the free market and capitalism, U.S. bases in Europe eventually projected and embodied the American century. Focusing on the case of an American base installed in the Dutch village of Schinnen, this article shows that American military outposts in Europe have constantly disseminated the American way of life in a number of ways: they have affected the local economy, generated cross-cultural encounters and deeply impacted the surrounding environment. Taking into account the positive as well as negative dynamics set into motion by the American military presence in Schinnen, this article invites further inquiry into the relationship between the centre of the American empire and its periphery, and puts the historical and historiographical viability of the American century to the test.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"280 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115332076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
P. D. Bolla, E. Jones, P. Nulty, Gabriel Recchia, John Regan
{"title":"The Conceptual Foundations of the Modern Idea of Government in the British Eighteenth Century: A Distributional Concept Analysis","authors":"P. D. Bolla, E. Jones, P. Nulty, Gabriel Recchia, John Regan","doi":"10.18352/hcm.575","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18352/hcm.575","url":null,"abstract":"This essay sets out a new method for the history of ideas. Using a mixed approach combining computer assisted reading methods with more traditional close reading, the essay tracks the evolution of a set of terms over the eighteenth century that have become central to how we think about government in particular and political concepts in general. The essay is offered as an example of how data mining very large digital archives allows us to see trends and patterns that are invisible at the granular level of human scale reading, and it proposes that these largescale observations can both complement and complicate our hitherto analogue histories of ideas. The findings of this mixed approach indicate that ‘despotism’ functioned as a type of gate in an electronic circuit, sometimes allowing the connection to liberty and government and on others blocking those connections. Most significantly ‘despotism’ is shown to be an essential ingredient in the conceptual foundations of a theory of rights, liberty and government in the period and that this structure underpins contemporary theories of government.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123403803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Noisy Modernization? On the History and Historicization of Sound","authors":"J. Hoegaerts, Kaarina Kilpiö","doi":"10.18352/HCM.576","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18352/HCM.576","url":null,"abstract":"Sound ‘does’ things to places, to people and to time: it can affect change. This collection focuses specifically on the role sound has played as an agent of modernity. How were sound and music used as the material of modernization, how did they help create group identities, how were they mobilized in asserting power? In order to study this active quality of sound and music in the formation of the modern world, the contributors to this collection propose an interdisciplinary approach, including methods from sound studies and cultural musicology, and data from archives as well as record collections and catalogues.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132521691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Sound of a New Era: On the Transformation of Auditory and Urban Experience in the Long Fin de Siècle, 1880–1930","authors":"Daniel Morat","doi":"10.18352/HCM.573","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18352/HCM.573","url":null,"abstract":"In his 1930s memoir ‘Berlin Childhood around 1900’, Walter Benjamin recollects the ringing of the telephone as a sound that sharply interrupted the quiet of his middle-class family home and signalled the beginning of a new era. Following Benjamin’s lead, the article retraces the decades around 1900 as an era of transformation in which fundamental changes in the urban environment, in society and technology also lead to a crucial change of auditory experience. The new sounds of this era, from telephone rings to city noises to gramophone recordings, and the ways in which contemporaries dealt with them can therefore be used as a kind of sonic probe to detect broader transformations of modern experience.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"75 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115032718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jim Crow Democracy: The U.S. South and Racialized Policy-Making in the Aftermath of World War II","authors":"Maarten Zwiers","doi":"10.18352/HCM.570","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18352/HCM.570","url":null,"abstract":"Segregationist politicians from the U.S. South played key roles in devising plans for the reconstruction of Germany, the Marshall Plan and the drafting of displaced persons legislation. This article discusses how their Jim Crow ideology calibrated the global and domestic order that emerged from the ashes of World War II. Southern advocates of this ideology dealt with national and foreign issues from a regional perspective, which was based on the protection of agricultural interests and a nascent military-industrial complex, but above all, on the defence of white supremacy. In general, they followed a lenient course toward Germany after the country’s defeat in World War II, for various reasons. The shared experience of post-war reconstruction, containment of communism and feelings of kinship between the Germanic people and the Anglo-Saxons of the U.S. South were some of the motives why many white southerners did not endorse punitive measures against the former enemy. For them, an obvious connection existed between the local and the global, which strongly reverberated in the formation of U.S. foreign and domestic policy in the post-war world. The rebuilding of Germany and the fugitive question were shaped on the basis of a Jim Crow blueprint.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"178 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125812543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Trading Boots for Dancing Shoes’: Women and the Military Expression of the American Century in France, 1917–1967","authors":"François Doppler-Speranza","doi":"10.18352/HCM.572","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18352/HCM.572","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the role of women in public diplomacy operations on and around U.S. military bases in France, especially during the Cold War. It aims to illustrate the diplomatic role of military officers’ wives in France and shows the vested interest of the military establishment in cooperating with civilian offices of public diplomacy. The more the United States demonstrated its leadership on the global scene, manifested by a wave of unprecedented military incursions into foreign territories, the more tight government control gave way to a strategy focusing on informal contacts between women of both countries at the local level. This article argues that military wives, often considered a traditional instrument of America’s effort to engage with foreign populations, contributed to the ‘parabellicist’ approach in U.S. public diplomacy, a strategy which aimed to generate ‘a nation in arms’, as has been suggested. The article contends that women’s social and cultural initiatives intended not to influence French women by pushing American values, but to support the U.S. national security effort from the bottom up, which was the most critical challenge underlying the ‘American Century’ in France.","PeriodicalId":227091,"journal":{"name":"International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115137344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}