Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Fractured Twentieth Century PDF full book. Access full book title The Fractured Twentieth Century by Jerry Grafstien. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Jerry Grafstien Publisher: Mosaic Press ISBN: 1771616822 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 524
Book Description
A personal history of the fragmented 20th century that has careened from modern technology to barbarity in a complex and confusing spiral. The author is the son of immigrants who were born thirty kilometres from each other in southern Poland. Fortuitously, due to religious ties, they met in Toronto in 1927, fell in love, married and settled in London, Ontario in 1930. The author's father's life spanned the first half of the twentieth century until his tragic death in a street accident in 1950. His mother's life spanned the entire twentieth century, born in 1900, arriving in Canada in 1907, and she passed away in 2002, in Toronto, and remained lucid to the end.History repeats itself, while mistakes are little learned from errors, venality and endless brutality. At best, he witnessed the descent from principle to pragmatism. He is fortunate in encountering fascinating personalities in politics, religion, arts, academia, and sports all of whom left singular impressions on him and others in Canada and around the globe. Ultimately, he discovered that it is not the destination but the journey along the way that continues to astound and surprise him as the innards of the human condition revolves and evolves without rhyme or reason.
Author: Jerry Grafstien Publisher: Mosaic Press ISBN: 1771616822 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 524
Book Description
A personal history of the fragmented 20th century that has careened from modern technology to barbarity in a complex and confusing spiral. The author is the son of immigrants who were born thirty kilometres from each other in southern Poland. Fortuitously, due to religious ties, they met in Toronto in 1927, fell in love, married and settled in London, Ontario in 1930. The author's father's life spanned the first half of the twentieth century until his tragic death in a street accident in 1950. His mother's life spanned the entire twentieth century, born in 1900, arriving in Canada in 1907, and she passed away in 2002, in Toronto, and remained lucid to the end.History repeats itself, while mistakes are little learned from errors, venality and endless brutality. At best, he witnessed the descent from principle to pragmatism. He is fortunate in encountering fascinating personalities in politics, religion, arts, academia, and sports all of whom left singular impressions on him and others in Canada and around the globe. Ultimately, he discovered that it is not the destination but the journey along the way that continues to astound and surprise him as the innards of the human condition revolves and evolves without rhyme or reason.
Author: Eric Hobsbawm Publisher: New Press, The ISBN: 1595589929 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
Eric Hobsbawm, who passed away in 2012, was one of the most brilliant and original historians of our age. Through his work, he observed the great twentieth-century confrontation between bourgeois fin de siècle culture and myriad new movements and ideologies, from communism and extreme nationalism to Dadaism to the emergence of information technology. In Fractured Times, Hobsbawm, with characteristic verve, unpacks a century of cultural fragmentation. Hobsbawm examines the conditions that both created the flowering of the belle époque and held the seeds of its disintegration: paternalistic capitalism, globalization, and the arrival of a mass consumer society. Passionate but never sentimental, he ranges freely across subjects as diverse as classical music, the fine arts, rock music, and sculpture. He records the passing of the golden age of the "free intellectual" and explores the lives of forgotten greats; analyzes the relationship between art and totalitarianism; and dissects phenomena as diverse as surrealism, art nouveau, the emancipation of women, and the myth of the American cowboy. Written with consummate imagination and skill, Fractured Times is the last book from one of our greatest modern-day thinkers.
Author: Daniel T. Rodgers Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674064364 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 361
Book Description
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the ideas that most Americans lived by started to fragment. Mid-century concepts of national consensus, managed markets, gender and racial identities, citizen obligation, and historical memory became more fluid. Flexible markets pushed aside Keynesian macroeconomic structures. Racial and gender solidarity divided into multiple identities; community responsibility shrank to smaller circles. In this wide-ranging narrative, Daniel Rodgers shows how the collective purposes and meanings that had framed social debate became unhinged and uncertain. Age of Fracture offers a powerful reinterpretation of the ways in which the decades surrounding the 1980s changed America. Through a contagion of visions and metaphors, on both the intellectual right and the intellectual left, earlier notions of history and society that stressed solidity, collective institutions, and social circumstances gave way to a more individualized human nature that emphasized choice, agency, performance, and desire. On a broad canvas that includes Michel Foucault, Ronald Reagan, Judith Butler, Charles Murray, Jeffrey Sachs, and many more, Rodgers explains how structures of power came to seem less important than market choice and fluid selves. Cutting across the social and political arenas of late-twentieth-century life and thought, from economic theory and the culture wars to disputes over poverty, color-blindness, and sisterhood, Rodgers reveals how our categories of social reality have been fractured and destabilized. As we survey the intellectual wreckage of this war of ideas, we better understand the emergence of our present age of uncertainty.
Author: Yuval Levin Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 0465093256 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 274
Book Description
Americans today are frustrated and anxious. Our economy is sluggish, and leaves workers insecure. Income inequality, cultural divisions, and political polarization increasingly pull us apart. Our governing institutions often seem paralyzed. And our politics has failed to rise to these challenges. No wonder, then, that Americans -- and the politicians who represent them -- are overwhelmingly nostalgic for a better time. The Left looks back to the middle of the twentieth century, when unions were strong, large public programs promised to solve pressing social problems, and the movements for racial integration and sexual equality were advancing. The Right looks back to the Reagan Era, when deregulation and lower taxes spurred the economy, cultural traditionalism seemed resurgent, and America was confident and optimistic. Each side thinks returning to its golden age could solve America's problems. In The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin argues that this politics of nostalgia is failing twenty-first-century Americans. Both parties are blind to how America has changed over the past half century -- as the large, consolidated institutions that once dominated our economy, politics, and culture have fragmented and become smaller, more diverse, and personalized. Individualism, dynamism, and liberalization have come at the cost of dwindling solidarity, cohesion, and social order. This has left us with more choices in every realm of life but less security, stability, and national unity. Both our strengths and our weaknesses are therefore consequences of these changes. And the dysfunctions of our fragmented national life will need to be answered by the strengths of our decentralized, diverse, dynamic nation. Levin argues that this calls for a modernizing politics that avoids both radical individualism and a centralizing statism and instead revives the middle layers of society -- families and communities, schools and churches, charities and associations, local governments and markets. Through them, we can achieve not a single solution to the problems of our age, but multiple and tailored answers fitted to the daunting range of challenges we face and suited to enable an American revival.
Author: Konrad H. Jarausch Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691196486 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 462
Book Description
The gripping stories of ordinary Germans who lived through World War II, the Holocaust, and Cold War partition—but also recovery, reunification, and rehabilitation Broken Lives is a gripping account of ordinary Germans who came of age under Hitler and whose lives were scarred and sometimes destroyed by what they saw and did. Drawing on six dozen memoirs by Germans born in the 1920s, Konrad Jarausch chronicles the unforgettable stories of people who not only lived through the Third Reich, World War II, the Holocaust, and Cold War partition, but also participated in Germany's astonishing postwar recovery, reunification, and rehabilitation. Bringing together the voices of men and women, perpetrators and victims, Broken Lives offers new insights about persistent questions. Why did so many Germans support Hitler through years of wartime sacrifice and Nazi inhumanity? How did they finally distance themselves from the Nazi past and come to embrace human rights? The result is a powerful portrait of the experiences of average Germans who journeyed into, through, and out of the abyss of a dark century.
Author: Martin Gilbert Publisher: Rosetta Books ISBN: 0795337329 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 723
Book Description
A chronological compilation of twentieth-century world events in one volume—from the acclaimed historian and biographer of Winston S. Churchill. The twentieth century has been one of the most unique in human history. It has seen the rise of some of humanity’s most important advances to date, as well as many of its most violent and terrifying wars. This is a condensed version of renowned historian Martin Gilbert’s masterful examination of the century’s history, offering the highlights of a three-volume work that covers more than three thousand pages. From the invention of aviation to the rise of the Internet, and from events and cataclysmic changes in Europe to those in Asia, Africa, and North America, Martin examines art, literature, war, religion, life and death, and celebration and renewal across the globe, and throughout this turbulent and astonishing century.
Author: Eric J. Hobsbawm Publisher: ISBN: Category : Civilization, Modern Languages : en Pages : 319
Book Description
Born almost a hundred years ago in Vienna - the cultural heart of a bourgeois Mitteleurope - Eric Hobsbawm, who was to become one of the most brilliant and original historians of our age, was uniquely placed to observe an era of titanic social and artistic change. As the century progressed the forces of Communism and Dadaism, Ibiza and cyberspace, would do battle with the bourgeois high culture fin-de-siecle Vienna represented - the opera, the Burgtheater, the museums of art and science, City Hall. In Fractured Times Hobsbawm unpicks a century of cultural fragmentation and dissolution with characteristic verve and vigour. Hobsbawm examines the conditions that created the great cultural flowering of the belle epoque and held the seeds of its disintegration, from paternalistic capitalism to globalisation and the arrival of a mass consumer society.
Author: Philipp Blom Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 0465040713 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 497
Book Description
When the Great War ended in 1918, the West was broken. Religious faith, patriotism, and the belief in human progress had all been called into question by the mass carnage experienced by both sides. Shell shocked and traumatized, the West faced a world it no longer recognized: the old order had collapsed, replaced by an age of machines. The world hurtled forward on gears and crankshafts, and terrifying new ideologies arose from the wreckage of past belief. In Fracture, critically acclaimed historian Philipp Blom argues that in the aftermath of World War I, citizens of the West directed their energies inwards, launching into hedonistic, aesthetic, and intellectual adventures of self-discovery. It was a period of both bitter disillusionment and visionary progress. From Surrealism to Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West; from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to theoretical physics, and from Art Deco to Jazz and the Charleston dance, artists, scientists, and philosophers grappled with the question of how to live and what to believe in a broken age. Morbid symptoms emerged simultaneously from the decay of World War I: progress and innovation were everywhere met with increasing racism and xenophobia. America closed its borders to European refugees and turned away from the desperate poverty caused by the Great Depression. On both sides of the Atlantic, disenchanted voters flocked to Communism and fascism, forming political parties based on violence and revenge that presaged the horror of a new World War. Vividly recreating this era of unparalleled ambition, artistry, and innovation, Blom captures the seismic shifts that defined the interwar period and continue to shape our world today.
Author: Eric Hobsbawm Publisher: Pantheon ISBN: 0307426416 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 482
Book Description
Eric Hobsbawm is considered by many to be our greatest living historian. Robert Heilbroner, writing about Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes 1914-1991 said, “I know of no other account that sheds as much light on what is now behind us, and thereby casts so much illumination on our possible futures.” Skeptical, endlessly curious, and almost contemporary with the terrible “short century” which is the subject of Age of Extremes, his most widely read book, Hobsbawm has, for eighty-five years, been committed to understanding the “interesting times” through which he has lived. Hitler came to power as Hobsbawm was on his way home from school in Berlin, and the Soviet Union fell while he was giving a seminar in New York. He was a member of the Apostles at King’s College, Cambridge, took E.M. Forster to hear Lenny Bruce, and demonstrated with Bertrand Russell against nuclear arms in Trafalgar Square. He translated for Che Guevara in Havana, had Christmas dinner with a Soviet master spy in Budapest and an evening at home with Mahalia Jackson in Chicago. He saw the body of Stalin, started the modern history of banditry and is probably the only Marxist asked to collaborate with the inventor of the Mars bar. Hobsbawm takes us from Britain to the countries and cultures of Europe, to America (which he appreciated first through movies and jazz), to Latin America, Chile, India and the Far East. With Interesting Times, we see the history of the twentieth century through the unforgiving eye of one of its most intensely engaged participants, the incisiveness of whose views we cannot afford to ignore in a world in which history has come to be increasingly forgotten.
Author: Jerry Grafstien
Author: Jerry Grafstien
Author: Eric Hobsbawm
Author: Daniel T. Rodgers
Author: Yuval Levin
Author: Konrad H. Jarausch
Author: Jerry S. Grafstein
Author: Martin Gilbert
Author: Eric J. Hobsbawm
Author: Philipp Blom
Author: Eric Hobsbawm