‘Unity,stability, continuity’: heritage and the renovation of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, 1957–1969

Spain between 1957 and 1969 – the period in the history of the dictatorial regime of General Francisco Franco known as desarrollista (development‐guided) – presents a peculiar case of a state‐driven heritage industry. The present article examines the desarrollista policy aimed at creating and coordinating heritage tourism, focusing on periodical publications, official speeches, films and promotional materials. It looks at late‐Francoist heritage as a vehicle for achieving, simultaneously, an ideological and an economic effect. Economically, heritage was conceived as a tool for diversifying and individualising Spain’s tourism product in the Mediterranean market, and above all, for confronting the uneven territorial and seasonal distribution of ‘sun and beach tourism’. At the same time, ideologically, the models and uses of heritage examined here served the regime’s interest in securing the country’s territorial unity, maintaining the high profile of the Catholic Church, and re‐legitimising the Civil War (1936–1939) which had brought Franco to power.     

The ‘Feast of the Liberation of Jerusalem’: remembering and reconstructing the First Crusade in the Holy City, 1099–1187

Every year on 15 July the Latin inhabitants of twelfth-century Jerusalem celebrated a feast in remembrance of the capture of the Holy City by the forces of the First Crusade on that day in 1099. This article explores how the inhabitants of Jerusalem interpreted that day – the culminating events of the crusade – in the context of celebrating this 15 July feast. It examines the events which took place in Jerusalem as the city fell on 15 July 1099 and traces the establishment of the feast, showing that it was founded within a few years of 1099. It then considers the development of the feast over the course of the twelfth century and examines the ritual processions prescribed in one liturgical programme used in Latin Jerusalem. It argues that the route of these processions had two functions: firstly, it mirrored the actions of the First Crusaders in Jerusalem on 15 July 1099; and, secondly, it visibly aligned Latin Jerusalem with sites which were associated with the Old and New Testaments. The route of these processions in Jerusalem was intended to convey an interpretation of the First Crusade as the continuation of biblical history.     

National identity and the representation of Italy at war: The case of Combat film

This article examines the documentary series Combat film made by Leonardo Valente and Roberto Olla for Rai-Uno. Shown in April 1994, the series was based on film taken by the American army (1943-5) and provoked a national scandal when it was first shown. The article argues that in order to fully understand Combat film it is necessary to look at the overall design of the programme as well as its content. By concentrating on the 'special' shown on 5 April 1994 the author demonstrates how the revisionist message of 'national reconciliation' which underlies the programme is reinforced by a series of formal and technical strategies.     

Tannery and Duhem on the Concept of a System in the History of Philosophy and History of Science

ABSTRACT

This article examines John Toland’s Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews (1714) by placing it alongside other elements of his engagement with Jewish history, Mosaic principles and wider “Hebraica” – specifically, an appendix to his Nazarenus (1718) and his Origines Judaicae (1709). Although Toland’s case for Jewish naturalization shows the strong influence of Locke’s case for political and religious toleration, and also of a general “mercantilism”, it is argued that one of its main characteristics is a philosophical naturalism, shown in its treatment of the human species as a whole. Furthermore, it is also argued that this same naturalism is evident throughout Toland’s engagement with Jewish history and Mosaic thought. Accordingly, when we “fold” these works into each other, we find each enhancing our understanding of the others – not just as examples of Toland’s treatment of “Jewish affairs”, but also as illustrations of a consistent conceptual materialism. To emphasize this, the article concludes by suggesting that the figure of Rabbi Simone Luzzatto, author of a 1638 plea for tolerance, provides an important clue in understanding the links between Toland’s political injunctions and the philosophical foundation on which they are built.     

The Red Cross and the Establishment of Maternal and Infant Welfare in the 1930s Gold Coast

In 1932 the Gold Coast Branch of the British Red Cross Society was inaugurated in Accra. Its central, stated purpose was to maintain and expand health and welfare services for women and children. This article examines closely the work of the Red Cross as it set up and ran clinics, fundraising campaigns and building programmes in the Gold Coast. It asks how a humanitarian organisation became so integrated into services for mothers and infants in the course of the 1930s. In so doing, it contributes to a burgeoning area of historiography that looks at humanitarianism as a key component of Empire. During the 1930s, as the British Empire became subject to oversight by new international networks that the League of Nations sat at the heart of. In this context, the colonial government was under pressure to provide welfare for African subjects, particularly mothers and babies. This article argues that state, mission and eventually humanitarian organisation – the Red Cross – were interdependent in providing these services. The Red Cross became politicised as it shored up the colonial state’s health infrastructure, intervening as a solution to dilemmas over who was responsible for maternal and infant health.     

Women,Fascism and Work in Francoist Spain: The Law for Political,Professional and Labour Rights

The Sección Femenina (or SF, 1934–77), the female branch of the Spanish fascistic party, the Falange, created and successfully lobbied for the Law for Political, Professional and Labour Rights for Women (Ley de Derechos Políticos, Profesionales, y de Trabajo de la Mujer) in 1961. The law responded to and recognised the shifting world of women's work during the final years of the Franco regime (1939–75) and established the SF as an advocate for their labour rights. The new legislation simultaneously promoted employment opportunities for Spanish women and reinforced their traditional restrictions. This article explores this significant legal achievement for women's rights during the 1960s, discussing its meaning for the Franco dictatorship and for the female organisation that ushered in the new legislation. Ultimately, I argue that the law was a significant step for the advancement of women's rights and continued the piecemeal process of reform led by the SF. But it reinforced the group's paradoxical image as an organisation with fascist roots pushing (albeit in the workplace only) for reform.     

National identity,devolution and secession in Canada,Britain and Spain*

ABSTRACT. The aim of this article is twofold. First, it examines whether devolution fosters the rise of dual identities – regional and national. Second, it considers whether devolution encourages secession or, on the contrary, it stands as a successful strategy in accommodating intra‐state national diversity. The article is divided into three parts. First it examines the changing attitudes towards Quebec's demands for recognition adopted by the Canadian government from the 1960s to the present. It starts by analysing the rise of Quebec nationalism in the 1960s and the efforts of the Canadian government to accommodate its demands within the federation. It then moves on to consider the radically new conception of Canadian unity and identity embraced by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and its immediate impact upon Quebec. The paper argues that Trudeau's ‘nation‐building’ strategy represented a retreat from the pro‐accommodation policies set in place to respond to the findings of the 1963 Royal Commission on Biculturalism & Bilingualism (known as the B&B Commission). Trudeau's definition of Canada as a bilingual and multicultural nation whose ten provinces should receive equal treatment alienated a significant number of Quebeckers. After Trudeau, various attempts were made to accommodate Quebec's demand to be recognised as a ‘distinct society’– Meech Lake Accord, Charlottetown Agreement. Their failure strengthened Quebec separatists, who obtained 49.4 per cent of the vote in the 1995 Referendum. Hence, initial attempts to accommodate Quebec in the 1960s were replaced by a recurrent confrontation between Canada's and Quebec's separate nation‐building strategies. Second, the article explores whether devolution fosters the emergence of dual identities – regional and national – within a single nation‐state. At this point, recent data on regional and national identity in Canada are presented and compared with data measuring similar variables in Spain and Britain. The three modern liberal democracies considered here include territorially circumscribed national minorities – nations without states ( Guibernau 1999 ) – endowed with a strong sense of identity based upon the belief in a common ethnic origin and a sense of shared ethnohistory – Quebec, Catalonia, the Basque Country and Scotland. Third, the article examines whether devolution feeds separatism by assessing support levels for current devolution arrangements in Canada, Spain and Britain. The article concludes by examining the reasons which might contribute to replacing separatist demands with a desire for greater devolution.     

Backlash of the Free World: the US presence at the World Youth Festival in Helsinki, 1962

The Soviet-sponsored World Festival of Youth and Students brought an exceptional number of US citizens to Helsinki in the summer of 1962. The event was made important by the fact that it took place in neutral territory. Furthermore, this event briefly made Helsinki a centre of extensive Cold War operations. This article examines the background and impact of this festival in the larger context of the Cold War and international relations. The timing of the festival is especially intriguing, between two major Cold War confrontations, the Berlin crisis of 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. However, instead of being an open conflict between warring parties, the festival reminds us of other conflicts of the cultural Cold War: it was waged through front organizations. Both the KGB and CIA were involved behind the scenes deploying their representatives and trying to impact the Finns' – but also the other festival delegates' – thinking, and win them over to their respective causes. This article exploits both Finnish and American archival sources, mostly intelligence reports from the festival. Apart from the festival in Helsinki, therefore, this article illustrates the way in which Finland was subjected to political and cultural influencing by the superpowers during the height of the Cold War.     

The politics of time during the Napoleonic Consulate, 1799–1804

ABSTRACT

The French Revolution generated an acceleration of political time that disrupted old assumptions about the legitimacy and durability of political authority. Following the coup of 18 Brumaire, Napoleon and his counsellors had to confront the challenge of erecting a legitimate regime that would endure in a political environment where regimes that endured very often appeared illegitimate. This article examines how the French Consulate (1799–1804) sought to manage revolutionary time by practising a politics of temporal dilation. The embryonic institutions of the Consulate – from the Légion d’honneur to the lycées – were designed to decompress popular perceptions of time, at least as they related to political life, by charting a verifiable pathway for the nascent regime to develop steadily and incrementally through history. The collective perception of the present was made to expand, re-validating the notion of historical experience and slowing the unruly onset of the political future. Time would cease to be the medium of rupture. This article examines how the temporal assumptions embedded within the regime discourses and political practices of the Napoleonic Consulate were central to the construction of its own legitimacy.     

The Irish Sandow school: physical culture competitions in fin-de-siècle Ireland

ABSTRACT

Beginning with an examination of Ireland’s turn of the century interest in physical culture, this article highlights the case of Eugen Sandow’s “Great Competition” and its Irish contestants. Seen as a precursor for today’s bodybuilding competitions, Sandow’s contest enjoyed submission photographs from hundreds of half-naked men – many of whom were Irish – posing in Greco-Roman pose. In studying this topic, the article addresses two pressing issues. In the first instance, the article examines how and why physical culture competitions became a competitive outlet for Irishmen in the first decade of the twentieth century. Secondly, it argues that these contests were often connected to broader societal ideals surrounding acceptable forms of masculinity. The article thus examines a previously unexplored but nevertheless important part of sporting and athletic behaviour in early twentieth-century Ireland.     

Engels and the question about cities

In his 1969 Trevelyan Lectures, Franco Venturi argued that Kant's response to the question “What is Enlightenment?” has tended to promote a “philosophical interpretation” of the Enlightenment that leads scholars away from the political questions that were central to its concerns. But while Kant's response is well known, it has been often misunderstood by scholars who see it as offering a definition of an historical period, rather than an attempt at characterizing a process that had a significant implications. This article seeks (1) to clarify, briefly, the particular question that Kant was answering, (2) to examine – using Jürgen Habermas’ work as a case in point – the tension between readings that use Kant's answer as a way of discussing the Enlightenment as a discrete historical period and those readings that see it as offering a broad outline of an “Enlightenment Project” that continues into the present, and (3) to explore how Michel Foucault, in a series of discussions of Kant's response, sketched an approach to Kant's text that offers a way of reframing Venturi's distinction between “philosophical” and “political” interpretations of the Enlightenment.     

Socialism and democratic strategy in Italy’s Biennio Rosso: Gramsci contra Treves

This article examines the divisions in Italian socialism between revolutionaries and reformists against the backdrop of the Biennio Rosso (1919–20), taking the writings of Antonio Gramsci and Claudio Treves respectively as characteristic of the two traditions. The central focus is on their opposing accounts of how the socialist movement should organize the masses to achieve its objectives – referred to here as its ‘democratic strategy.’ I demonstrate how the key strategic elements of Gramsci’s and Treves’s positions developed in a dialogue centered on the place that violence, (il)legality, soviets, parliaments and compromise should play in effectively mobilizing the masses for socialism. The article concludes by arguing that in retrospect Treves’s reformism has been a more successful approach, and Gramsci himself conceded something to it in his prison writings. However, I also maintain that the popular character of Gramsci’s radical democratic strategy – first fashioned in the Biennio Rosso – can still contribute to debates on socialism and social democracy today.     

#GomorraLaSerie: Converging audience and enhanced authorship on twenty-first-century Italian screens

Based on Roberto Saviano’s book Gomorra (2006), production of the TV series Gomorra – La serie (2014) was met with scepticism as many feared it would glamorise organised crime and, consequently, attract young people toward Camorra affiliation. The series’ bleak portrayal of criminals and criminality was offered as a response to such concerns. Despite the preoccupations, Gomorra – La serie was hugely successful and, because of its quality, was sold to other countries. In Italy, the series’ success can be measured by the popularity of its Twitter hashtag #GomorraLaSerie. Engaged with Henry Jenkins’ theories of media convergence and based on a corpus of tweets bearing this official hashtag, this article proposes a quantitative analysis and advances conclusions regarding the Italian TV audience and second-screen viewing practices. Additionally, through a qualitative study of Saviano’s tweets about the series, it examines the writer’s use of the social media platform as a tool of narrative continuity. Finally, the article highlights a few examples of fan-generated media and concludes with remarks regarding Saviano’s problematic position at the centre of a transmedia object.     

A nineteenth-century Mediterranean union: Michel Chevalier’s Système de la Méditerranée

This article examines one of the nineteenth-century’s most revolutionary schemes for establishing a union of Mediterranean states. In 1832, Michel Chevalier set out a startling scheme that would bring to an end armed conflict in Europe through a confederation of European states and a subsequent alliance between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. His plan envisaged a vast infrastructure network of railways, canals, roads and shipping lanes that would link the major ports of the Mediterranean with Europe’s capital cities and those of the Ottoman and Russian Empires. The infrastructure network at the heart of Chevalier’s Système de la Méditerranée was conceived by him as the basis for a system of economic integration that would foster political harmony throughout Europe – anticipating by over one hundred years Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman’s plans for a European Union – but also between Europe and the Ottoman world. Harboured within Chevalier’s infrastructure scheme for the Mediterranean was one of the earliest and most complex nineteenth-century theories of networks ever devised. This article examines the centrality of the Mediterranean to Chevalier’s theory of networks, and explores the multiple dimensions of this complex theory, including the intimate connection he identified between networks as expressions of human creativity and the kind of unalienated human relations that would result in the end of conflict both between and within nations.     

Handcraft as Cultural Diplomacy: The 1968 Mexico Cultural Olympics and U.S. Participation in the International Exhibition of Popular Arts

Mexican post-revolutionary cultural institutions excelled at implementing Mexican art and popular arts as key elements in cultural diplomacy. However, while there is abundant research regarding these arts and their inclusion in international exhibitions during the first part of the twentieth century, there is little research on their role in international cultural diplomacy during the second half of that century. In the first part of this article I present a historiographical appraisal of the 1968 Mexican Cultural Olympiad and the resolutions of the “First Latin American Seminar on Popular Arts and Crafts” sponsored by UNESCO in Mexico City in 1965. In the second, I examine the case of U.S. participation in the “Exposición Internacional de Artesanías Populares” (International Exhibition of Popular Arts), which was part of the 1968 Cultural Olympiad’s programme – largely neglected by the historiography of the XIX Olympics – to explain how popular arts were made to perform as agents of cultural diplomacy in Mexico and the U.S. during the Cold War. In addition, I argue that U.S. participation in this exhibition also reveals negotiations and redefinitions of the concepts of handcraft and arte popular, and the economic and social situation of their makers in the United States.     

Celebrating British multiculturalism,lamenting England/Britain's past

Drawing upon Littler and Naidoo's ‘white past, multicultural present’ alignment, this article examines English newspaper coverage of two ‘British’ events held in 2012 (the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympic Games). In light of recent work on English nationalism, national identity and multiculturalism, this article argues that representations of Britain oscillated between lamentations for an English/British past – marred by decline – and a present that, while being portrayed as both confident and progressive, was beset by latent anxieties. In doing so, ‘past’ reflections of England/Britain were presented as a ‘safe’ and legitimate source of belonging that had subsequently been lost and undermined amidst the diversity of the ‘present’. As a result, feelings of discontent, anxiety and nostalgia were dialectically constructed alongside ‘traditional’ understandings of England/Britain. Indeed, this draws attention to the ways in which particular ‘versions’ of the past are engaged with and the impact that this can have on discussions related to multiculturalism and the multiethnic history of England/Britain.     

Monks and children: corporal punishment in Late Antiquity1*

This article examines the place of corporal punishment in early monastic discipline. By comparing the role assigned to corporal punishment in a variety of monastic rules from across the late antique Mediterranean, from the Rules ascribed to Pachomius (d. 348), to the Rule of Benedict from the mid-sixth century, it demonstrates that late antique monastic writers had a sophisticated and ordered approach to this type of penalty. This approach drew both on the concept of the absolute authority of the punishing father in Scripture, and on the limitations of Roman social expectations and ancient educational values to such absolute authority. As a result corporal punishment was seen either as a last resort when all other disciplinary measures had failed to bring about a reasonable response, or the appropriate punishment for an offence that originated from irrational conduct. Contrary to ancient household practices, however, which seem to have reserved corporal punishment for small children and slaves – conventionally perceived to lack ability to reason – late antique monastic rules invoked corporal punishment as a possibility for every member in the community who demonstrated irrational behaviour. In this way they blurred traditional boundaries between children, slaves and adults.     

Cities are Alive with the Sound of Music: Saengerfest and the Transformation of Urban Public Music in Nineteenth-century America

This article examines the development of outdoor public music in American cities during the nineteenth century and develops three primary arguments. Organized and recreational forms of public music – such as musical festivals and outdoor band concerts – became commonplace and integral to city life during the second half of the nineteenth century. Second, German-American singing festivals (Saengerfests) were major public events during the mid-nineteenth century and helped create this recreational public music culture by demonstrating how organized and recreational public music could enhance city life and suggesting to commentators and public officials that it could serve as a tool of reform. Third, public music – such as occurred during Saengerfests – helped bridge social divisions and made American cities more socially fluid, even at a time when some aspects of civic life were becoming more divided and contentious.