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141 books match the query 'Twentieth Century' and 5 start with d

cover of Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century

Designs of Destruction

The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century

Lucia Allais

University of Chicago Press, 2018

How architectural monuments survived and historical preservation was reinvented during the destructions of the twentieth century.
 
The twentieth century was highly destructive, but from its landscapes of ruins was born a new architectural type: the cultural monument. In the wake of World War I, an international movement arose which aimed to protect architectural monuments in large numbers, and regardless of style, hoping not only to keep them safe from future conflicts but also to make them worthy of protection from more quotidian forms of destruction. An evolving group—including architects, intellectuals, art historians, archaeologists, curators, and lawyers—grew out of the new diplomacy of the League of Nations. During and after World War II, it became affiliated with the Allied Military Government and was eventually absorbed by the UN as UNESCO. By the 1970s, this organization had begun granting World Heritage status to a global register of significant sites—from buildings to bridges, shrines to city centers, ruins to colossi.

Examining key episodes in the history of this preservation effort—including projects for the Parthenon, the Cathedral of St-Lô, the temples of Abu Simbel, and the Bamyian Buddahs —Lucia Allais demonstrates how the group deployed the notion of culture to shape architectural sites, and how architecture in turn shaped the very idea of global culture. Designs of Destruction emphasizes how the technical project of ensuring various buildings’ longevity jolted preservation into establishing a transnational set of codes, values, and practices. At the same time, this paradoxically helped integrate technologies of destruction—from bombs to bulldozers—into cultural governance. Designs of Destruction not only offers a fascinating narrative of cultural diplomacy, based on extensive archival findings; it also contributes an important new chapter in the intellectual history of modernity by showing the manifold ways architectural form is charged with concretizing abstract ideas and ideals, even in its destruction.

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cover of Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century

Disappearing Tricks

Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century

Matthew Solomon

University of Illinois Press, 2010

Disappearing Tricks revisits the golden age of theatrical magic and silent film to reveal how professional magicians shaped the early history of cinema. Where others have called upon magic as merely an evocative metaphor for the wonders of cinema, Matthew Solomon focuses on the work of the professional illusionists who actually made magic with moving pictures between 1895 and 1929.

The first to reveal fully how powerfully magic impacted the development of cinema, the book combines film and theater history to uncover new evidence of the exchanges between magic and filmmaking in the United States and France during the silent period. Chapters detailing the stage and screen work of Harry Houdini and Georges Méliès show how each transformed theatrical magic to create innovative cinematic effects and thrilling new exploits for twentieth-century mass audiences. The book also considers the previously overlooked roles of anti-spiritualism and presentational performance in silent film.

Highlighting early cinema's relationship to the performing body, visual deception, storytelling, and the occult, Solomon treats cinema and stage magic as overlapping practices that together revise our understanding of the origins of motion pictures and cinematic spectacle.

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cover of Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century

Dishing It Out

Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century

Dorothy Sue Cobble

University of Illinois Press, 1991

Back when SOS or Adam and Eve on a raft were things to order if you were hungry but a little short on time and money, nearly one-fourth of all waitresses belonged to unions. By the time their movement peaked in the 1940s and 1950s, the women had developed a distinctive form of working-class feminism, simultaneously pushing for equal rights and pay and affirming their need for special protections.

Dorothy Sue Cobble shows how sexual and racial segregation persisted in wait work, but she rejects the idea that this was caused by employers' actions or the exclusionary policies of male trade unionists. Dishing It Out contends that the success of waitress unionism was due to several factors: waitresses, for the most part, had nontraditional family backgrounds, and most were primary wage-earners. Their close-knit occupational community and sex-separate union encouraged female assertiveness and a decidedly unromantic view of men and marriage. Cobble skillfully combines oral interviews and extensive archival records to show how waitresses adopted the basic tenets of male-dominated craft unions but rejected other aspects of male union culture. The result is a book that will expand our understanding of feminism and unionism by including the gender conscious perspectives of working women.

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cover of Distorted Mirrors: Americans and Their Relations with Russia and China in the Twentieth Century

Distorted Mirrors

Americans and Their Relations with Russia and China in the Twentieth Century

Donald E. Davis & Eugene P. Trani

University of Missouri Press, 2009

As the United States enters the twenty-first century, it confronts two powers that loomed less large on the world stage a century before. Yet American policies toward Russia and China have been shaped by attitudes going back even further, as this new book relates.
Distorted Mirrors traces American prejudices toward the two countries by focusing on the views of influential writers and politicians over the course of the twentieth century. Donald Davis and Eugene Trani show where American images of Russia and China originated, how they evolved, and how they have often helped sustain foreign policies generally negative toward the former and positive toward the latter.
This wide-ranging survey draws on memoirs, archives, and interviews, much the material appearing in print for the first time, to show how influential individuals shaped these perceptions and policies based on what they saw—or thought they saw—in those two countries. Through a series of tableaux that traces America’s relations with Russia and China through the twentieth century, the authors show how personalities of certain players impacted interpretation of key situations and conflicts and how cultural attitudes toward Russia and China became ingrained and difficult to dislodge.
The book traces formative attitudes back to two late-nineteenth-century books, with George Kennan’s Siberia and the Exile System painting a grim picture of tsarist penal colonies and William Rockhill’s Land of the Lamas depicting China as an exotic Shangri-la. Davis and Trani show how these images were sustained over the years: for Russia, by Slavic expert Samuel Harper, State Department official Robert Kelley, journalist Eugene Lyons, ambassador William Bullitt, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and policymakers George F. Kennan and Paul Nitze; and for China, by President Woodrow Wilson, philosopher John Dewey, journalist Edgar Snow, novelist Pearl S. Buck, ambassador Nelson T. Johnson, FDR, journalist Theodore White, and statesman Henry Kissinger. They also relate how Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush tried to replace these misconceptions with a policy of accommodation, and they assess the state of current U.S. attitudes and policies.
Distorted Mirrors marks a fresh approach to U.S. relations with these countries, emphasizing long-term attitudes that influenced policies rather than the reverse. It shows us that perceptions shaped over the course of the twentieth century are crucial for their bearing on the twenty-first, particularly if those unrestrained prejudices reemerge.
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cover of Disturbers of the Twentieth Century: Catholic Social Critics in Modern Britain

Disturbers of the Twentieth Century

Catholic Social Critics in Modern Britain

Adam Schwartz

Catholic University of America Press, 2026

Building on his acclaimed The Third Spring, Adam Schwartz presents a pioneering analysis of the social commentary of G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones. These four converts were exemplars of the Catholic literary revival as a “counter-politics” that provided a radical, supernaturalist alternative to predominant secularist social ideologies and systems from a distinctly Roman Catholic standpoint.  Disturbers of the Twentieth Century explores this facet of each writer’s work more thoroughly than earlier studies have done, and does so in comparison to his counterparts’ thought.  The Catholic literary revival hence emerges as a vital, yet largely neglected, voice in historical and sociological discussions of the relationship between religion and politics in the modern era. In the process, Schwartz uniquely situates these Catholic authors in broader heritages of British and Western protest thought dating to the Romantics, showing how their shared resistance to industrial technocracy (and its socio-political effects) and growing secularization was defined distinctively by Roman Catholicism.  The converts’ challenge was bolder than post-Reformation British Catholics had usually uttered in an often-hostile political culture.  Nonetheless this quartet’s criticism was always constructive, as they eschewed nostalgia and endeavored consciously to engage twentieth century society in its particular genres and discrete conditions to transform it into an “alternative modernity” governed by Roman Catholic principles. Schwartz therefore recasts understanding of movements like Chesterton’s distributism while elucidating originally other counterstatements, such as Dawson’s Christian corporatism, and deploying newly discovered and published material, including poetry and prose by Jones and letters and journalism by Greene.  Schwartz in turn interrogates misconstruals of the authors’ relationships to totalitarian ideologies, even as he confronts forthrightly controversial subjects such as antisemitism.  Disturbers of the Twentieth Century is thus an accurate, textured account of the “public doctrine” these trenchant Catholics proposed as the source of social renewal and cultural regeneration for a “century of bones.”
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