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In World War II American intelligence proved to be a place where German-Jewish émigré intellectuals not only warred against Germany but also connected successfully to their American-born comrades. This paper is dealing with a post-war intellectual network contributing to the intellectual foundations of the New Left in the United States. The origins of this circle of intellectuals can be traced back to the wartime Office of Strategic Services. In the early Cold War period intellectual analysts of Nazi Germany continued their cooperation in academic settings, and with support from philanthropic institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation. In this context their leftist political discourse and activism took shape. Their Cold War politics, however, was associated with their concept of intellectual history as well as with a "decontaminated" version of Weimar thought. A close reading of archival sources with regard to Herbert Marcuse will exemplify the main argument of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the situation, dilemmas, and political activities of Arab exiles and students in Germany between 1933 and 1945. The author discusses the question of individual moral culpability, describes the pressures and exploitation experienced by Arabs in National Socialist Germany, and presents the consequences of their stay in Germany for their later lives, careers, and thinking. The Egyptian journalist and political activist, Husni al-Urabi, is mentioned, along with Arab students in Berlin.

Sexual violence created an utterly asymmetric constellation between the offender and the violated person, as well as between the accuser and the court. This paper differentiates and criticises this simple and static view. With a comparative perspective on European examples and based on court records of the communal state of Zurich, the paper discusses how to dealwith the conceptual and empirical problems arising in a historical analysis: How can we make pre-modern and modern sources relate to each other? How can we approach what “rape" and “abuse" meant for the contemporaries?What can we find out about the constellations between the accusers, the defendants and the court? How can we understand the sentences which seem extremely unjust to us today as being fair at that time? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of a "third world" rose to prominence in international political discourse around 1960 and vanished around 1990. It designated a group of countries aligned with neither of the two other worlds. I argue in this article that the term needs to be situated in a larger history of the perception of global difference at least as old as the Enlightenment. The peculiar career of the concept of the "third world" is connected both to changes in the order of knowledge and, more specifically, to the history of economic thought, of which it is an effect. The paper thus focuses on the emergence of the term around 1960 and investigates the irrelevance of economics in late colonialism as opposed to the prominence of economic experts in the post-1945 world order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the continuity of personal interlocks among German major companies from 1914 to 1938. Continuity in economic transactions together with concentration, cartelization and a corporative system is regarded as a main characteristic of the German production system. The paper analyses the continuity assumption concerning interlocks in a period of critical economic shifts and multiple changes of the political system. As a result, the extreme economic cuts after the First World War had lower impact on network change compared to the global economic crisis after 1929. Generally, the structure of the production system remained flexible. It was after 1933 when the National Socialists came into power that stability increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the topic of parliamentary debates in the aftermath of the dictatorship in Poland. Analysing the parliament's lustration debates as a case study, the paper demonstrates how the Polish model of coming to terms with the past had been influenced by the experiences of other European countries. This is achieved by employing the concept of “translation" and examining when that concept was put into practice by the Polish parliament. Thereby the following questions are discussed: What was drawn from the original foreign experience? What became lost in the process of translation and which factors determined this practice? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary research, the history of Protestant mission societies is often studied as a constitutive element of political, social, and cultural developments within the broader frame of non-European and colonial history. Mission societies are viewed as translocal enterprises and analysed as multi levelled, interactive, and dialogical phenomena. The paper focuses on specific forms of mediation within the mission context in eighteenth century South India carried out by intermediaries (middlemen/interpreters/translators) who had developed the skills and knowledge required for these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the political and social conflicts in 18th century Val de Bagnes. The existence of a large genealogical database of its population provides new insights into the mobilization patterns of an early modern rural area. Our prosopographical approach, which attempts to identify the protagonists of the different conflicts, reveals the existence of well-organized and relatively stable political factions. Rather than simply being shaped by personal solidarities, they had a coherent political program. Comparison with genealogical data reveals the influence of kinship ties within the political factions, which are responsible for continuities within the structure of political conflicts. However, kinship alone does not explain the logic of political mobilization, other social networks like spiritual kinship or village solidarities also need to be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most early modern instances of migration are connected to the emergence of the modern state, and/or to the different confessional cultures in Europe following the Reformation. Since the onset of modern times and, contrary to recent trends in migration research, early modern migrations have mainly been analyzed as a challenge to the order and stability of early modern society. Migrants were furthermore looked upon as part of somewhat “given" groups (for instance “the" Huguenots, Salzburgers etc.) defined by geographical, ethnic, or religious characteristics. The paper argues for a more thorough analysis of the historical dimension of such presuppositions, and challenges older dichotomies in research of early modern migrations. It advocates a view based on the communicational opportunities and individual options of migrants within the contemporary political and confessional frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent paper, Gerhard Schildt has argued that we suffer from mass unemployment today because technical progress has caused structural change that has led to a long-term decrease of working opportunities. By showing the secular decline of hours worked per year, Schildt concludes that this trend is irreversible and causes increasing unemployment. We argue that this conclusion is based on the confusion of a statistical observation with a causal explanation. Schildt's thesis is not compatible with the empirical fact that every advanced country has experienced the same decline of hours worked whereas many do not suffer from unemployment today. Moreover, Schildt focuses only on the labour demand of firms without taking into account the labour supply of households. It is not that technological progress has rendered human work obsolete, but rather the other way round: it allows us a life that is not fully devoted to work in order to survive and even comes along with a much higher standard of living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of memory had great impact on cultural history during the last two decades.However, due to the influence of theorists such asMaurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora, it is often used in a very limited way only: either as a denomination for collective interpretations of the past or as a synonym for historical myths. Individual memory is often construed as a mere function of such collective patterns of historical perception. Several studies using the method of oral history, though, have demonstrated the tensions and the discrepancies that can exist between individualmemory and hegemonic discourses of remembrance. In this paper, I will argue that the use of the oral history methodology bears a considerable social historical potential for the history of recollection and [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East Germany is one of the most secularized regions in the world. The paper argues that this development was the result of not only a political conflict, fought with repression and pure power, but also an ideological conflict. The institutional conflicts between churches and the state were intertwined with ideological conflicts, above all the devaluation of religion by scientistic arguments. Since the second half of the 19th century numerous organisations engaged in the promotion of science as an explicit counterpart to traditional religion. During the existence of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), thismovement took off in the country's institutions.The article outlines this development by focussing on the Urania. Founded in 1888 to provide scientific knowledge without an anti-religious agenda, in 1954 the Urania was resurrected in the GDR to propagate the “ScientificWorld-View." The Urania tried to combine popular scientific themes (astronomy, aerospace) with a particular interpretation referring to theWissenschaftlicheWeltanschauung. The article analyses the program and work of the Urania until the end of the GDR. Finally it presents research results to show how this promotion of scientism contributed to the East German secularization process on an individual level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The communist commitment of intellectuals in West Germany during the period from the end of the Second World War until the Hungarian crisis in 1956 was based on a secular form of political faith. This paper will first discuss the term "intellectual" and develop - using Paul Tillich's and Max Weber's thoughts on religious theory - a particular concept of "political faith". On this basis, the causes and motives for the conversions of the intellectuals of the West German KPD will be investigated. These conversions had mostly already occurred during the Weimar Republic or during the Nazi period. Further, the change in the intellectuals' political faith in the epoch from 1945 to 1956 will be traced. In this context it will become apparent that the intellectuals 'understanding of their role and the forms of their political commitment were closely connected to the specific nature of their faith in communism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the early 20th century onwards, US-American foundations played an important role as exponents of worldwide philanthropic engagement. The Rockefeller Foundation (RF) gained special significance as it promoted research in Europe in general and sponsored the social sciences in Germany, France and Great Britain in particular. This paper first sets out central links of the topic with current research on international „scientific diplomacy", Americanization, Philanthropy and Cultural Transfer. Then it drafts major aspects of the concrete historical setting of the RF's philanthropic engagement in Europe in the interwar years. Finally it discusses main features of the academic infrastructure in Germany, France and Britain that shaped the Foundation's funding strategies. Thus it offers a rough comparative outline of - partly similar, partly peculiar - Western European preconditions of transatlantic knowledge transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studying the history of German foundations since 1945 meets with a number of methodological difficulties. Empirical and historical studies have been very rare for nearly a century. The paper therefore concentrates on a number of post-1945 creations and asks whether they may be seen as matching the development of an overall conception of civic engagement. It shows that donors gradually move from strict subservience to the state to a vision of an independent pursuit of public purposes, while retaining a strong interaction with the state, which by creations of its own and political and regulatory measures remains highly influential. The findings suggest that foundations present a good case for the peculiarly German corporatist paradigm of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the German Kaiserreich, urban expansion and social segregation fostered new mechanisms of indirect and delegated gift-exchange in which the mediations between donors and recipients became increasingly important. In urban societies, mediators were in greater demand than ever before to act as system builders in forging connections between civil society, the municipality, and the state, coordinating private philanthropic initiatives and institutionalizing the resources available for patronage. This paper draws on theories of gift exchange and of social recognition in order to overcome the false dichotomy of interest v. morality in philanthropic action. The cases of failed patrons, competing mediators of culture and disregarded outsiders may illustrate why the history of philanthropy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries cannot simply be regarded as a success story of middle-class civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The case study examines the career of British politician and imperial official John Pope Hennessy. Using this example, the author seeks to elucidate the concept of an imperial biography, which he defines as biographies of socially and geographically mobile elites within an empire. He also discusses the historiography of British imperialism, the alternate example of British colonial statesman Edward John Eyre, and the use of network analysis in the study of colonialism and imperialism.

In the history of development there has been a tendency to attribute developmental initiatives to coordinating centres in the global north and view countries in the south as recipients, a phenomenon that continues to the present day. The Central American Nutrition Institute (INCAP) is by contrast an example of a regional institution that not only generated a considerable body of knowledge concerning the nutritional state of the region and policy proposals but also advocated an alternative development model emphasizing local resources. Although INCAP enjoyed some success in disseminating a number of its ideas through international organisations, the implementation of its vision was ultimately hampered by the unstable political situation prevailing in Central America in the time period analyzed in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1928 the Rockefeller Foundation financed a Social Science Research Section (SSRS) at the American University of Beirut. This article uses the story of the SSRS to argue that the interwar years in the Middle East were a germination period of development and modernization theory and practice. The period was one of transition: Ottoman influences lingered into the age of European colonialism while decolonization gathered pace and international actors increasingly spoke up. The SSRS reflected this transitionality. Firstly, it was institutionally part of a new university-foundation-development-missionary complex that would build a social science empire by connecting Western and Middle Eastern networks. Secondly, its political aim was to guide decolonization. Finally, the SSRS addressed the epistemic problem of being Western in the now decolonizing non-West by terming its research /proto-development sites 'laboratories' and insisting that its research was universally valid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the role awarded to agriculture and the rural sector in international development thinking over the course of the twentieth century, focusing especially on the modernization approaches promoted by development agents to reform agricultural practices and rural life according to the problems they believed they had identified. The majority of the countries that came to be understood through the prism of development were predominantly rural, agricultural, or both. The article thus argues that it is vital that we better understand the ways in which development experts and policymakers conceptualized rural life and agricultural production with an eye to identifying both similarities and differences across temporal and spatial distances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, the causes and events that have ultimately led to states being unable to service their debts have often been remarkably similar. This article adopts a different perspective and investigates how assumptions about economic uncertainty determine future expectations and influence decision-making in public debt crises. The article explores these questions through an analysis of the postwar shift in the global market for public loans, and the role of financial organizations such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the Bank for International Settlements. The findings suggest that the crisis of the 1980s caused the ideas and practices of international debt settlement to be rewritten due to changes made in the market for national-debt instruments, which was established as a direct response to the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the rise of public debt in Italy since the 1970s. It argues that Italy's path into debt differed from other countries of Southern Europe. Rather than historical path-dependencies, both the macro-economic conditions during the 1970s and the specific interests of the institutions involved in the debt management can explain the countries growing deficits. The article shows how the Italian central bank was able to increase its institutional power, while the financial sector profited from the trade in government bonds and treasury certificates. The high saving rates of private households, which financed a huge part of the public debt, explain why there have been no dramatic bank insolvencies or external debt crises in Italy since the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When, how and why did the expectation of exponential economic growth emerge historically? This article explores this question through a transnational historical analysis of economic and policy-making expertise within the debates of the industrialized countries' think tank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and its predecessor, the OEEC. It focuses in particular on the setting of growth targets in the years 1952, 1961, and 1970. These targets not only illustrate the escalatory logic of exponential growth but also highlight the changing concepts, justifications, and implications that mark the (re-) making of the economic growth paradigm at key junctures in postwar history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1917 to 1924, groups of German children were sent on Erholungsreisen (vacation journeys) to German-speaking villages in Transylvania. These trips were organized jointly by nationalist associations in Germany and their partners in Transylvania, who hoped to reinforce bonds between Germans abroad and the Mutterland. The success of the 1917 trip contrasts with the failure of later campaigns. Empathy between Reichsdeutsche and Ausländsdeutsche was immediately intelligible in the context of a common war effort, but later trips foundered a divergence of opinion about where charity was needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the end of the twentieth century, most descendants of the Berlin missionaries in South Africa had become integrated into Afrikaans-speaking white society to the extent that they could “pass” as Afrikaners, many of them also selfidentifying as such. The complex undertones of German-South African identity become apparent when looking into early twentieth century projects run by missionaries and their sons with the aim of ingratiating themselves with the Afrikaner establishment as “twin souls” - German-Afrikaners. This article makes use of Afrikaans and German popular magazines, and German-South African works of fiction (short stories as well as novels), not in the first instance for their literary quality, but rather for the extent to which these media served as performative spaces in which German-South African men could act out their various social roles and contemplate the convergence between different identities assumed for different occasions. Particular attention is paid to the “backstage” of female domesticity, and how the construction of the ideal German Hausfrau continued to anchor male “occasionalism” well into the twentieth century, until this sublimated figure became too problematic when seen in the context of other local possibilities, often embodied by Afrikaner women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introductory essay engages with recent work on the myriad groups of German speakers that flourished outside the borders of the German nation-state between the 1880s and the 1930s. Since the end of the Second World War, scholars have treated the notion of the Ausländsdeutsche (German expatriates) with considerable ideological suspicion. This essay, however, argues that a German history that moves beyond those prejudices and integrates these communities of German-speakers into a more inclusive historiography offers us the chance to create a dialog between German national history and the histories of the nations and regions in which German cultures took hold and, to use the language of the times, where German colonies were founded. The integration of these German spaces and their diverse communities into our historical narratives offers us the chance to fashion a more inclusive notion of German history, one that effectively decenters the role of the German nation-state by recognizing the inherently polycentric character of German nationhood during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the formation of the Teddy Boy youth subculture in postwar Great Britain. The creation of counterculture group identity through fashion is described, the influence of late 19th-century working-class fashion on the subculture is identified, and social change wrought by the subculture is examined. Information is offered on the role of suburbanization in increasing occupation of public spaces such as movie theaters, streets, and theater halls by young people in the 1950s as well as the adoption of coolness into youth culture.

The article introduces the topics of the January 2015 issue of the social history periodical "Geschichte und Gesellschaft" with a focus on the use of counterworlds as a research tool with case studies including the Kurt and Erna Kretschmann environmental protection center in East Germany, encounters between clergy and liberals in late 19th-century Poland, and the influence of idealized Native American values on the Protestant church in West Germany during the 1960s and 1970s.

The article examines the historical reduction of social and economic inequality in Western Europe during the 1960s and 1970s. Alleged increases of equality in the realms of housing, medical care, and education are questioned, taxation, education reform, and welfare in 20th-century Western Europe are analyzed, and information is offered on the role of socialist democratic governments in reducing the inequalities inherent in industrialized capitalist economic systems. The role of the government in increasing equality is questioned.

The article presents an obituary for German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler.

The article discusses government regulation of prostitution during the early Allied occupation of Japan as well as laws and policies designed to curb the spread of sexually-transmitted infections among members of the American armed forces who consorted with prostitutes. The influence of Japanese imperialism on the prostitution industry is examined, the reinforcement of traditional gender roles and heterosexuality in Japanese government policy is described, and analysis is offered of the symbolism of women's bodies, soldiers' bodies, and the Japanese national body.

The article examines the social function of the private acquisition of state-controlled rural property in late 19th-century Prussia by Germans. Attempts by immigrating German colonist landholders to "civilize" Prussia are described, nationalist and racist elements of the desire to "Germanize" the eastern regions of the country against the perceived threat of Polish ethnic overrun are analyzed, and the reinforcement of the existing social hierarchy through the actions of the German state is analyzed. The use of the Prussian colonies as test cases for chemical fertilizers and other soil amendment techniques as well as for German governance is examined.

The article examines political and legal debates about the economic exploitation and strategic significance of the international seabed in the mid-twentieth century. The author particularly focuses on the development of underwater laboratories in the context of the overall policies of the United States and West Germany with regard to international waters. Issues discussed include proposals for the internationalization of the sea and the seabed in the context of the Cold War, the history of oceanography and government aid to it, and the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea.

The article examines the role of foreign expert advisers from West Germany in the fishing industry in Thailand from 1959 to 1975. The author analyzes the social and symbolic dimensions of German development aid aimed at the economic modernization of developing countries. Issues discussed include German and Thai understandings of fish as livestock and as a natural resource, conflicts between economic interests and environmental concerns, for example with regard to the problem of overfishing, and the symbolic capital of economic development.

The essay discusses the economic impact of World War I from the perspective of the broader history of globalization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Topics addressed include the historiography on early twentieth-century economic history, inflation caused by the war, and efforts to reconstruct international economic relations after the war.

The essay discusses attitudes toward World War I in the United States before the country's official entry into the war. Topics examined include attitudes toward the German attack on and occupation of Belgium and efforts to provide civilian relief there, spearheaded by the Committee for Relief in Belgium (CRB), a charitable organization, conflicting expectations regarding racism and civil rights among African Americans, and the efforts of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) to provide aid to Jews in Russia.

The article presents a political history of the Islamic countries that emerged from the Ottoman and Russian Empires in the aftermath of World War I. The author highlights Muslim attitudes toward republicanism, parliamentary government, and constitutionalism. Examples discussed in detail include the brief independence of majority-Muslim areas of the former Russian Empire in Central Asia and their reintegration into the Soviet Union, the Kemalist revolution in Turkey between 1918 and 1923, and the short-lived Socialist revolution in the province of Gilan, Iran, led by Iranian military officer Mirza Kuchak Khan from 1920-1921.

A biography of Ottoman governor and grand vizier Avlonyalı Ferid Pasha is presented. Issues addressed include his upbringing and early political career in the peripheral provinces of the Ottoman Empire, which led him from his native Albania via Crete, Greece, and the Balkan Peninsula to the central government of the Ottoman Empire, his life and career as representative of the broader career patterns of political elites in the Ottoman Empire, and Ferid Pasha's political loyalties between his Albanian heritage and his role in Ottoman politics.

The article examines debates about the respective utility of railroads and roads as cargo transportation means in Great Britain and Germany in the interwar period. The author highlights the competition between railways and trucking as the primary mode of freight transport and that this competition was indicative of broader social changes in the two countries. Among other topics, she also discusses the work of transportation planners, state policies concerning transportation, and transportation management as a form of social engineering.

The article traces the history of the Bretton Woods monetary system from its inception in the mid-1940s to its collapse in the early 1970s. Focusing particularly on economic, monetary, and fiscal policy in the Federal Republic of Germany during this time period, the authors chart debates in West German politics, in the European Economic Community (EWG/EEC), and internationally on such questions as currency revaluations, the global market for gold, and the contribution of competing interest rate policies, particularly of the German Bundesbank and the U.S. Federal Reserve System, to the breakdown of the monetary system. The influence of the Bretton Woods System on the subsequent system of cooperative monetary policy in the EEC, known as the Snake in the Tunnel, is also considered.

The article discusses the creation and eventual economic disintegration of the sterling area, which focused on Great Britain and former and current British colonies and which stabilized the international monetary system after World War II. Topics include the relation of the sterling area to the Bretton Woods foreign exchange system, the influence of the area on international trade in relation to British exports, and the impact of a 1967 devaluation of the sterling on the sterling area. The relation of the sterling area to monetary integration is noted.

The article discusses the end of the gold standard as a standard for foreign exchange rates from 1929 to 1936 as an aspect of the Great Depression. Topics include the relevance of the end of the gold standard to the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis beginning in 2009, the reinstatement of the gold standard during the interwar period, and the economic effects of the end of the gold standard. The impact of the end of the gold standard on economic recovery is noted in light of the work of economic historians Barry Eichengreen and Jeffrey Sachs.

The article attempts to explain the rise of international human rights politics in the 1970s and to assess what difference they made in the international relations of that era. The author argues that in order to understand the reasons for the surge of human rights a polycentric approach is needed, focusing on the changed moral and political attitudes of civil activists, the distinct foreign policy needs of Western governments and the new experiences of oppression among victims of state terror. He further demonstrates how initiatives in the name of human rights notably transformed international politics. They narrowed the space of action of repressive regimes, albeit slightly and indirectly, and gave individual suffering an unprecedented salience in the international realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European tradition of what became known as “classical" music is unique among Western arts because it resisted influences from non-Western civilisations. In the contemporary world, both the European canon of musical masterpieces and the social setting of western musical life have been exported to many different parts of the world with few changes. This tradition of European musicmaking should not obscure the global contexts in which music evolved, in particular from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. This article outlines several of these contexts, including exoticism, colonial rule, the mobility of musicians, the impact of new reproductive technologies, and the concept of “world music". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In shaping the institution of the museum, the French revolutionaries similarly established it as a cultural agent resting upon specific cultural techniques which still account for its modernity down to the present day. On the backdrop of the all-embracing notion of the “new world" which the revolutionaries repetitiously made use of, the discussions about the creation of the Louvre outlined the museum's genuine cultural performance in terms of museification. The following article tries to develop this argument and expounds a poetics of the modern museum being essentially grounded, first, on the present as most important time line, second, on the aesthetics of the exhibits, and third, on the utopian moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the nexus between Jewish immigration to the Federal Republic of Germany and legal definitions of German ethnicity (Volkszugehörigkeit). It claims that the recognition of Jewish immigrants as Germans was continuously negotiated between different bureaucratic and societal actors struggling over the power to define who is a German. Examining the production of national belonging in practice, it breaks open the “black box" of the often alleged “ethnocultural" and “descent-based" German perception of nationhood. The fluid boundary between “German" and “Jewish" immigrants was only fixed in 1991 with the creation of the separate category of “Jewish quota refugee." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents and discusses the poetics of the museum while basing on an historical investigation of the museum as an institution in France between the years 1790-1795. Thus, the article determines that the French revolutionaries that stood behind the establishment of the museum, based its concept on a set of cultural techniques that have remained relevant throughout history and thus play a role in the present as well. The revolutionaries used the narrative of "a new world" when creating the Louvre museum. The article consequently explores the poetics of the museum in modernity while concentrating on its aesthetics from an historical perspective.

To many nineteenth-century observers it seemed that the telegraph would eventually accomplish what the advent of railways and steamships earlier in the century had begun: the so-called annihilation of space and time. Through the telegraph, both these factors would soon have no longer impact on human communication. This article focuses on one half of this contemporary notion: It examines the relation between telegraphy and time in detail and shows how ever smaller differences in time became more and more important in communication processes; how this in turn rendered precise time measurements and the standardization of time necessary; and how being telegraphically connected could affect contemporary perceptions of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate regarding the applicability of the secularization thesis needs to make a sharp distinction between the context in which it was created and the grounds for its validity. The aim of this essay is to find empirically and theoretically wellfounded arguments against the secularization theory and to examine whether they are justified or not. But before announcing one's intention of criticizing the secularization theory, one needs to know what it actually says. Frequently an abridged, unilateral concept of the theory is used enabling one to dissociate oneself from it critically. Therefore, this essay starts with a brief presentation of the main presumptions of the secularization theory, goes on to list the major points of criticism before ending with a discussion of their justification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay highlights the recent developments in the study of Arab responses to Fascism and Nazism between 1933 and 1945. It analyzes old approaches and paradigms that have emphasized the sympathy and collaboration of Arab leaders and forces with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. In criticizing these dominant research trends, the essay argues that it is mostly memories and political narratives produced in a later period which were responsible for such scholarly misunderstanding. This essay describes the politicization brought about by the establishment of Israel and the ensuing Palestinian-Arab-Israeli conflict on scholarly historical interpretations. It also brings new evidence and innovative research to the fore, demonstrating that many mainstream political leaders, intellectual forces and movements actually rejected and opposed the totalitarianism, racism, and imperialism of Nazism and Fascism in the public spheres. This introduction suggests new directions for further research on this critically important subject in Middle Eastern History. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]