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The presence of heavy metals in environment has been a subject of great concern due to their non-biodegradable nature. It is therefore important to continuously carry out environmental impact assessment and audit in order to evaluate the effects of these metals on the environment and meanwhile to design balanced and sustainable schemes of local industry development. The paper presents overview of heavy metal pollution in Armenia, especially in the regions, where mining industry recently is developed and where indices of heavy metal pollution are very high. Mining industry is the main source of heavy metal pollution in Armenia. Is developed a strategy of modeling of socio18 economical and ecological balance of heavy metal impact and a concept of integrated model is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In general analyses of earthquakes often only the vulnerability of surface installations is considered, without subsurface installations. But in the last decades, insurance assessments of losses due to earthquake catastrophes showed the need for a more detailed assessment of vulnerability to earthquakes. Therefore it is also necessary to precisely understand the exposure of subsurface installations. Research results identified the possibility of a categorisation and classification of damage to surface and subsurface installations of mines related to tectonic earthquakes. Collapses have the biggest impact for underground structures, whereas the surface installations suffer from damage to buildings and their contents. An interesting feature is the link between surface and subsurface damage scenarios. This leads to extensive economic loss, which could influence a whole region. The transposition of the loss scenarios to the German Mining industry indicated only a minor vulnerability. This is due to lower earthquake intensities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Monetary System For comprehension of the Russian monetary system prevailing after the Crimean War, a brief recap of its origins and evolution may prove helpful. The basic features of this system were established under Peter the Great. At the time, the state issued gold rubles, silver rubles (at the exchange rate of 13.8 silver rubles to 1 gold ruble), and small copper change. By 1755, under the Empress Elizabeth, the state issued a new set of gold pieces – so-called imperials and semi-imperials – at a high rate of exchange against the silver rubles. Finally, under Catherine II in 1759, paper money made its appearance under the name of assignat rubles. The price of the assignat was set almost equal to that of the silver currency. The number of assignats increased sharply afterward, particularly during the war with Napoleon, and their value declined appreciably. By 1810, under Alexander I, Russia finally decided to reduce the amount of paper rubles in circulation, increase their value, and ensure the country's monetary stability. To do so, the state adopted as a monetary basis silver monometallism, that is, it made the silver ruble the country's basic monetary unit. At the time, it had also been projected to give to the assignant a precise value in relation to silver, but the project was not carried out. The metallic money and the assignants continued to circulate jointly but at a high premium of exchange for the silver ruble. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transition and the Agricultural Economy Consider now the similarities and the differences among the three transitions toward modernization in general, the structural transformations they called forth, the changes they set in motion within the different frameworks in which they arose, and the conceptions advanced during their unfolding by the reformers who proposed the measures. In the pursuit of the same goal, namely “catching up” with the continually developing countries of Western Europe, the three Russian transitions toward modernity called forth many valid proposals and set in motion methods of changes; yet all ultimately yielded only limited results. Poor and underdeveloped Tsarist Russia aimed quite decisively from the 1890s on to surmount its backwardness, notably by supporting the expansion of some of Russia's industries oriented toward export, and forcefully developing Russia's railway network with substantial help from foreign capital. Yet, the succeeding Soviet Russia still inherited a backward, war-ravaged economy that in its turn tried to develop by emphasizing from 1928 on the rapid growth of heavy industry (oriented primarily toward military production), deliberately neglecting the civilian needs, and rejecting the import of foreign capital. After all this, however, Soviet Russia also failed to “catch up” and, as its leaders had pretentiously sought, to “surpass” the West. Finally, the patrimonial state of Boris Yeltsin and then of Vladimir Putin inherited the largely obsolescent Soviet industry within the limits of a former empire shattered in all its structural components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pattern of Growth Russian statistics concerning the manufacturing organization and enterprises, the scope of their privatization, and the resulting shares of the state and of the private sector are neither consistent nor easily disentangled. According to the official data, the number of manufacturing organizations and enterprises amounted in 1944 to 212,000 and in 1998 to 339,000. The number of manufacturing enterprises was given as 138,000 and 161,000 during the same period. Subtracting the latter data from the former, we find that the number of manufacturing organizations amounted to 74,000 in 1994 and to as much as 178,000 by 1998. As I already indicated in Chapter 20, the large and medium-sized enterprises included in the privatization program had to change into joint-stock companies, and the state, as we will see immediately, retained various positions within them. Many other groups of manufacturing enterprises followed undoubtedly the same legal transformation. Much of the growth of the manufacturing enterprises was due to the rapid creation of numerous small industrial enterprises. In 1992, for instance, the number of manufacturing enterprises totaled 25,244; by 1998, their total number was 161,000, out of which 134,180 were officially described as small enterprises. In both cases, the number of large enterprises amounts to 25,281 and 27,000 respectively, figures not far from the total of such enterprises in 1990, namely 26,900. Table 23-1 presents the numbers and composition of the manufacturing enterprises by main branches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa's long and loyal membership of the sterling area is one of the most remarkable features of that country's relations with Britain in the twentieth century (tables 6.1–6.3; figs. 6.1–6.4). Membership of the area signified a commitment to sustain a world-wide monetary and trading system that was the economic counterpart to and underpinning of the British empire and Commonwealth. Yet for the Afrikaner nationalists who dominated the South African government between 1924 and 1933, and again after 1948, there was no higher ambition than to free their country from subordination to Britain. What, then, induced successive South African governments to tie the value of the country's currency to sterling, conduct the bulk of its international business in sterling, and adopt measures which protected Anglo-South African trade from outside competition when, as the world's leading gold producer, South Africa could dig out of the ground what was for much of the century the most prized medium of international exchange? The sterling area first took recognisable shape in 1931 when Britain's abandonment of the gold standard forced other countries, including autonomous members of the Commonwealth such as South Africa, to choose between aligning their currencies with sterling or fixing them on some other basis. The overseas dominions, with their long-standing political and economic ties with Britain, may have seemed natural candidates for membership of the sterling area, since in many ways the area merely preserved an existing system of international economic relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of all the regions of the world where imperial Britain sought to exert influence, none exhibited more contradictions, and therefore such intractable dilemmas and frustrations, as South Africa. Cape Colony was conquered from the Dutch in 1806 and retained in 1815 because of its strategic importance on the route to India. Control of the hinterland inevitably followed. Britain thus acquired a foreign settler community of some 40,000, who resented a more intrusive government than they were used to and doctrines of race relations which seemed to them wrong-headed. Many Boers trekked into the interior from the 1830s, determined to assert their right to a quiet sweet life (lekke lewe) of their own choosing, free from interference, and to preserve what they regarded as ‘proper relations between master and servant’. The fundamental constitution (grondwet) of the South African Republic (Transvaal) made their intransigent Bantu policy all too plain (clause 9): ‘The people will admit no equalising (gelijkstelling) between the white and coloured inhabitants whether in church or state’ (February 1858). It was not simply that the Boers would not accept or admit black equality (for which the word would have been gelijkheid), but, more uncompromisingly, no assimilation, no making equal or treating as if equal. Treks enormously enlarged the area of contact and potential conflict on the highveld with spirited and sometimes highly mobile African chiefdoms determined to resist subjection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the British Liberal government in 1906 granted self-government to the Transvaal it is highly unlikely that ministers were moved by genuine magnanimity towards the defeated Afrikaners. It is equally unlikely that the Afrikaner leaders before 1914 felt any genuine sense of reconciliation to the British empire. The Liberal government pretended to be acting magnanimously, while Jan Smuts and Louis Botha pretended to be pursuing a policy of conciliation. Both sides projected these attitudes for purely tactical reasons. Neither trusted the other, but each independently thought that they could attain their objectives by behaving as if they did; and yet out of this unpropitious situation of double deception a workable relationship was in fact hammered out. The key fact is that the Liberals never intended Botha and Smuts to form the first ministry when responsible government was established in the Transvaal, but, turning a failure of planning to good account, gave the clear impression that they had intended it; and they thus perhaps began the process of turning Smuts's marriage of convenience to the empire into a love relationship with the Commonwealth. The idea of magnanimity has proved irresistibly attractive, even to those historians rightly sceptical of the influence of Smuts on this supposed British policy; and to advance such a set of contrary propositions is of course to challenge some of the most treasured orthodoxies enshrined both in imperial history and in the hagiographies of Smuts and the Liberal prime minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the passage of a century and the appearance of countless publications on the South African War, there remain the most profound differences of opinion about the war's origins. Many of the more recent accounts have emphasised Britain's economic interests in the southern African periphery – principally in the production and supply of gold – and the consequent necessity of removing the administratively backward and economically obstructionist regime of Paul Kruger in Pretoria. Other accounts have stressed the concerns of British government decision-makers at the imperial centre – concerns about British power and prestige, about the necessity of maintaining British paramountcy in southern Africa, and about safeguarding the strategically vital Cape route. Further divisions exist between those accounts which stress the broader structural forces at play and those which give a central role to key individuals such as Sir Alfred Milner (Britain's high commissioner and regional proconsul for southern Africa) or Joseph Chamberlain (the colonial secretary in London). This chapter will attempt to explain the War's origins through an analysis combining the broader economically driven developments in southern Africa; the geopolitical concerns of decision-makers in London; and the influence of Milner as the key ‘man on the spot’ and intermediary between the periphery and the centre. This explanation will be based on a model of imperial expansion first proposed by Ronald Hyam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the annals of industrialization, the Soviet experience is unique in its whirlwind rapidity. The vast transformations that shook Western Europe over centuries – proletarianization, industrialization, urbanization – were in the Soviet Union telescoped into a mere decade. The working class grew at an unprecedented rate, changing in size and social composition. Even more striking was the critical role of women: in no country of the world did they come to constitute such a significant part of the working class in so short a time. In 1930 alone, 473,000 women entered industry, more than four times the number of new women workers in 1929, to be followed by 587,000 more in 1931. Between 1929 and 1935, almost 4 million women began to work for wages, 1.7 million of them in industry. More women took jobs in industry than in any other sector of the economy. By 1935, 42 percent of all industrial workers would be women. In 1932 and 1933, women were the only new source of labor for the developing economy. Not only did women pour into the labor force in record numbers, they also flooded industries that had traditionally been dominated by men. They crossed the older lines of sex segregation that had persisted in Soviet industry through the 1920s, entering new industries such as machine building and electrostations as well as expanding branches of older industries such as mining, metallurgy, and chemical manufacture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of a new communist state demands from all participants in socialist construction a firm, genuinely proletarian labor discipline, the fullest use of every working day, every working hour, and the decisive elimination of all types of disorganized production, in particular absenteeism. Why do we need a second five-year plan when we have not gotten anything from the first one? Purge the Towns of Social [i.e., Human] Garbage! By the end of the term of the first five-year plan, 10.7 million new workers had entered the labor force. The cities and construction sites were teeming with people, but housing, running water, electricity, sewage disposal, and food distribution were all still woefully inadequate for the needs of the new population. People lived amid horrific conditions: crowded into single rooms and corners in subdivided apartments, in hastily erected, rickety barracks, in primitive tent and cave dwellings, even in the factories and shops themselves. Thousands of new, badly needed workers arrived each day at the country's sprawling construction sites, only to leave again for lack of housing. Turnover rates soared as workers sought better living situations in other places. Everywhere labor was on the move, trudging from building site to city, thronging the railroad stations, packing the trains. The plants and sites were extremely disorganized. Dining halls and kitchens built to serve several hundred workers now turned out meals for thousands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have, even now, no methodology for accounting for women or calculating the demand for them. There is no system and no plan. Work proceeds samotek. In the Leningrad electrical factory, Elektroapparat, the “door to the production shop was closed to women.” They could always be found outdoors, however, hauling heavy loads in the freezing, dirty yard that surrounded the factory. Male workers joked that the yard was “the women's shop.” By the beginning of 1931, the state had developed extensive plans for involving women in the labor force. NKT (the Commissariat of Labor) and Gosplan had drafted a five-year plan for female labor, the Party had launched a campaign to employ 1.6 million women, the government had published long lists of jobs reserved primarily or exclusively for women, and women's brigades had visited factories throughout the country to determine which jobs women could fill. Yet all of these plans, lists, and recommendations still existed only on paper. For the central authorities and KUTB (the Committee to Improve the Labor and Life of Women), the key question in 1931 was how to move plans from paper to reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fulfillment of the plan in 1931 and the following years demands a series of maneuvers from the labor force: a group of men must leave work, and women must replace them. Men, after retraining in their positions, will be sent to jobs that would be harmful to the female organism. In the summer of 1930, as hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers, peasants, and women poured through the tumbled gates to the working class, planners quietly tucked away a set of elaborate blueprints for the deployment of women in the files of the Commissariat of Labor (NKT), the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), and the Council of People's Commissars (SNK). The plans, redrafted many times, had resulted in a final, detailed document entitled “The Five-Year Plan for Female Labor.” Never published or publicly discussed, this plan had emerged from countless meetings of NKT, Gosplan, the Committee to Improve the Labor and Life of Women (KUTB), and other commissariats and departments throughout the spring and summer of 1930. Planners based their plan for female labor on intensive research into Soviet industry in 1930. Surveying the advances of rationalization and mechanization in various industries, they set target figures and training quotas for women throughout the economy, specifying their numbers and placement in various sectors, industries, shops, and jobs. The plans, preserved in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), are fully revealed and analyzed for the first time in this chapter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With babas, there is a lot of trouble. It is not worth it to put them to work at the bench. When we raise the question of hiring women in transport, the union officials and managers refuse with every bone in their bodies and say, “We do not want women,” even though they have the same skills as men and are able to work. This shows that the old life still lives among us, that the exploitation of women by men still has not disappeared. Women workers and activists were well aware of the failure of local authorities to implement the plans generated in Moscow, but they did not attribute the failure to disorganization or inadequate statistics. To them, the single most important factor influencing women's opportunities in the workplace was male prejudice. The number of women hired, the jobs they received, their access to skilled work, and their treatment on the shop floor were all affected by male attitudes toward female labor. Women were fiercely critical of planners, union and labor-department officials, managers, local Party leaders, foremen, shop heads, brigade leaders, and even their male coworkers. In their view, these men shared powerful prejudices that shaped, and limited, the world of female labor. Prejudice against female labor was not unique to Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We must broaden the circle of registration of the unemployed to include those who have not had the right to register with the organs of labor up to this time. We need to spend the minimum on housing to guarantee the maximum tempo of industrialization. This can be done only if we maximize the labor resources of the present urban population and those in the new towns. This means the maximum involvement of women. Throughout 1930 and 1931, labor officials struggled to apprehend and gain control of the vast changes taking place in the economy. Employees in the labor exchanges (birzhi truda) stood in the front line of the transformation, desperately trying to create order out of chaos. Caught between the insistent demands of managers for labor and the hordes of incoming workers on the one hand, and an increasingly obsolete labor policy on the other, they were largely ineffective in their efforts to direct and deploy the labor force. As labor shortages rapidly replaced unemployment, the state was forced to replace a policy based on exclusion with a scheme for recruitment. The Commissariat of Labor (NKT) was confronted with the new and difficult tasks of understanding, directing, and mastering the roiling waves of movement and migration stirred up by collectivization, the socialization of retail trade, and industrialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Millions of women – wives and family members of workers and employees, servants, women in handicrafts and artels, landless women, poor peasants, collective farmers, eastern tribal women – this entire mass, once occupied with exhausting and dulling household labor, is now joining the great socialist construction of the country. The composition of the new working class takes its shape in large measure from unused reserves in the working-class family. In the spring of 1929, the Party adopted the first five-year plan. The plan, taking up three volumes and more than two thousand pages, allocated 64.5 billion rubles to investment, 78 percent of which was targeted for heavy industry and 50 percent for new construction. Adoption of the plan, in the words of one economist, was “tantamount to turning the country into a vast construction site.” After a decade of unemployment and exclusion, the gates to the working class came tumbling down. Almost 2.3 million people entered the waged labor force in 1930, followed by 6.3 million more in 1931. Party leaders, labor officials, and planners critically noted at the time that this mass influx of new workers occurred “samotek,” or independent of any state plan or policy. The building of huge new industrial complexes and hydroelectric stations such as Magnitostroi, Kuznetsstroi, and Dneprostroi drew thousands of workers. Hungry town dwellers and dispossessed peasants massed at new construction sites and factory gates in search of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1920s, the male labor force poured in from the countryside and began to replace women in production. This frequently occurred under the banner of “rationalization,” but in fact, one group was laid off and another hired. Women fared badly in the mass layoffs on the railroads. When men and women held the same job, women were the ones to be laid off. There was a definite tendency to lay off women whose husbands were working. At the end of the 1920s, a poor peasant woman named Zaminskaia was abandoned by her husband. Left to fend for herself and her two children, she went to the city in search of work. She tried to register at the labor exchange, which dispensed both jobs and unemployment benefits, but was told she was eligible for neither. “You must first work six months for wages,” an official explained. Feeling increasingly hopeless, she ran from one state agency to another, from the Department of Labor to the local soviet to the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. She heard the same story from every official. Without previous work experience, she could not register to work. Finally she wrote a despairing letter to Rabotnitsa, a journal for women workers. “I am sick and I am starving,” she noted. “I have appealed everywhere.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Military and diplomatic necessity had made the vice-royalty of New Granada, the captaincy-general of Venezuela and the audiencia of Quito form one republic – the Republic of Gran Colombia – at independence. Its purpose was soon served, however, and its transience was apparent well before Bolívar's death in December 1830. The old imperial administrative divisions were not always clear, not always consistent in all branches of affairs, but they were supported by both common sense and local feeling. Distances were too great, provincial identity too strong, for government from Bogotá to last for long after final victory over the Spanish forces. There were no strong economic ties between the three provinces. Already by the end of the colonial period a sense of distinct identity was felt not only by the elite, but by a far wider section of opinion. As the early federalisms of the ‘Patria Boba’ era showed, these loyalties were more easily felt for a smaller compass than for that of the particular republic that was to emerge in 1830, but the larger entity did have some support in opinion, as well as in imperial tradition and in the geography of possible control. The common soldiers of the Venezuelan plains showed as early as 1816 what they thought of General Santander, calling this Bogotá-educated native of Cúcuta a ‘reinoso futudo’; General Santander reciprocated this distrust, and both as vice-president and later in opposition to Bolívar, many of his actions and utterances looked forward to a separate New Granada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the years between 1808 and 1825 a new relationship was established between the Spanish American economies and the world economy. In comparison with their much fuller incorporation into the expanding international economy which began around the middle of the century and became more pronounced from the 1870s, the changes which accompanied the achievement of political independence may well appear superficial and limited; nevertheless, they constitute a decisive turning-point in the relations between Spanish America and the rest of the world. The old colonial commercial system had been breaking down since the end of the eighteenth century, but it was only after 1808 that Spain was finally eliminated as the commercial intermediary between Spanish America and the rest of Europe, especially Britain. The special circumstances prevailing both in Europe and the Atlantic economy as a whole at the time had important consequences for Spanish America's future commercial relations. The advance of the French armies into the Iberian peninsula, which triggered off the separation of the American colonies from Spain and Portugal, was intended to complete the closure of continental Europe to British trade. Increasingly isolated from its European markets, Britain was trying, with an urgency bordering on desperation, to replace them. Thus, the opportunity provided by the transfer of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro to trade directly with Brazil for the first time was eagerly accepted. And as, following the overthrow of the Spanish crown in Madrid, the first political upheavals in Spanish America occurred, Rio de Janeiro became not only the entrepôt for an aggressive British commercial drive in Brazil itself but also in Spanish America, especially the Río de la Plata area and the Pacific coast of South America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crisis of the Spanish monarchy in 1808, which left the nation with no government of generally accepted legitimacy, could not help but have a profound impact on the American colonies from New Spain to the Río de la Plata. With hindsight it can be seen to have greatly accelerated those forces, already at work, which eventually produced the separation of the mainland colonies from Spain. At the time, however, outright independence appeared as one of only a number of possible responses, and it still had few proponents. Spanish Americans could accept the rule of Joseph Bonaparte. Alternatively, they could swear obedience either to the provisional authorities thrown up by the Spanish movement of national resistance against the French or else to Ferdinand VII's sister Carlota; the latter had earlier taken refuge in Rio de Janéiro with her husband, Dom João, prince regent of Portugal, and from there offered to rule temporarily on behalf of her brother. Or, again, they could establish native American juntas to rule in the name of the captive Ferdinand exactly as his Spanish provinces had done. In the short run this last alternative amounted to de facto autonomy within the framework of a common monarchy, while in the long run it was to prove a transitional stage to complete separation. Autonomy was nowhere sucessfully established before 1810, but that is not sufficient reason to take that year as the start of the independence movement; it is just that until 1810 the autonomists lost all their battles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the eve of the struggle for independence from Spain the viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico) constituted a vast area extending from the Caribbean to the Pacific and from the borders of Guatemala and Chiapas to the huge Eastern and Western Internal Provinces, including the territory later incorporated as the south-western United States. The viceroyalty, with a population in 1814 of 6,122,000 (the United States in 1810 had a population of 7,240,000) accounted for over one-third of the total population of the Spanish overseas empire. Mexico City, the viceregal capital, was the largest city in North or South America and, with a population in 1811 of 168,811, after Madrid, the second largest city in the empire. New Spain was also by far the richest colony of Spain. Its trade through the main port of Veracruz from 1800 to 1809 amounted to an annual average of 27.9 million pesos and in the next decade, between 1811 and 1820, to an annual average of 18 million pesos, divided equally between exports and imports. The colony's total output of goods and services stood in 1800 at approximately 240 million pesos, or roughly 40 pesos per capita. This was only half the per capita production of the United States, at that time, for example, but considerably more than that of any other American colony, Spanish or Portuguese. Agriculture and livestock, which employed approximately 80 per cent of the total labour force, produced about 39 per cent of national resources; manufacturing and cottage industries produced about 23 per cent of total output; trade accounted for 17 per cent; mining for 10 per cent; and the remaining ii per cent came from transportation, government and miscellaneous sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spain was a durable but not a developed metropolis. At the end of the eighteenth century, after three centuries of imperial rule, Spanish Americans still saw in their mother country an image of themselves. If the colonies exported primary products, so did Spain. If the colonies depended upon the merchant marine of foreigners, so did Spain. If the colonies were dominated by a seigneurial elite, disinclined to save and invest, so was Spain. The two economies differed in one activity: the colonies produced precious metals. And even this exceptional division of labour did not automatically benefit Spain. Here was a case rare in modern history – a colonial economy dependent upon an underdeveloped metropolis. During the second half of the eighteenth century Bourbon Spain took stock of itself and sought to modernize its economy, society and institutions. Reformist ideology was eclectic in inspiration and pragmatic in intent. The starting point was Spain's own condition, especially the decline in productivity. Answers were sought in various schools of thought. The ideas of the physiocrats were invoked to establish the primacy of agriculture and the role of the state; mercantilism, to justify a more effective exploitation of colonial resources; economic liberalism, to support the removal of restrictions on trade and industry. The Enlightenment too exerted its influence, not so much in new political or philosophical ideas as in a preference for reason and experiment as opposed to authority and tradition. While these divergent trends may have been reconciled in the minds of intellectuals, they help to explain the inconsistencies in the formation of policy, as modernity struggled with tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite considerable apprehension on the part of government officials and army commanders, the response of young laborers to the outbreak of the war and their behavior during its first year and a half could be perceived as a confirmation of the considerable effectiveness attained by the prewar youth salvation campaign in instilling patriotic sentiment. Initially industrial continuation school students volunteered in large numbers for premilitary training, and generally they celebrated nationalist commemorations like the kaiser's birthday with enthusiasm. As the Social Democratic party acceded to the Burgfrieden, the peace of the fortress, suspending class struggle for the duration of the war, and as older members and advisers to the Socialist youth movement were drafted, the Free Youth faded into a shadow existence. The spirit of patriotic harmony also extended to youth cultivation activities. Swayed by the general nationalist euphoria, the Catholic Church, which had been disenchanted by the increasingly military direction taken by prewar government youth activity, a direction exemplified by the Young Germany League, at first stopped criticizing government youth policy. Even some sectors of the Socialist party and affiliated subcultural associations like the Worker Gymnasts moderated their criticisms and expressed some interest in incorporating their programs into the broader youth cultivation campaign. As one well-known Rhenish Protestant teacher, active in youth cultivation, proclaimed, echoing the kaiser, “The storm wind of war has swept away all the party haggling of the German people.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As mentioned in Chapter 1, in terms of the “natural history” of the youth problem, the conferences of the Center for Workers' Welfare Institutions and Protestant Social Congress and the Erfurt essay contest in 1900 began the progression from the stage of awareness to the stages of policy determination and reform. The conferences and writings of the reformers served three fundamental purposes. First, they traced the origins of the working-class youth problem in order to determine its elements and measure its dimensions. Second, they explored in detail particular facets of the youth problem that they considered most serious: the deteriorating health of young workers, the declining morals of urban youth, and the rising rate of juvenile delinquency, among others. Third, they attempted to hammer out programs of legislation, institutional reform, and officially sanctioned and financed activities that could ameliorate, if not eradicate, the youth problem. Behind these endeavors lay an image of young workers that would be sketched at these conferences and would persist through the war, albeit with some minor retouching. Many of the binary oppositions that are standardly used to characterize the “Great Transformation” originated in the social thought of Imperial Germany: Ferdinand Tönnies's “community” versus “society,” Max Weber's contrast between traditional and rational action. The rapidity of Germany's industrialization and urbanization in the last half of the nineteenth century gave rise to a widespread sense of displacement and estrangement that prompted numerous German thinkers to grapple with the meaning of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]