Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Estonian nationalism revisited

This article revisits the topic of Estonian nationalism during the second half of the nineteenth century and up to the eve of independence in the early twentieth century. It briefly surveys the treatment of the Estonian case in recent larger works on nationalism and then offers an assessment of various issues relating to Estonian nationalism in its early phase, including the suitability of a strictly modernist approach, nation formation and the question of the spread of national consciousness on a mass basis, and the role of cultural versus political aspects. The article also notes the deepening of research on nationalism in post-communist Estonia, especially studies of social mobilisation, ties with neighbouring Finland and Latvia, and the role of Russification. It concludes with a reassessment of the salient elements of Estonian national identity in this period.     

Class cities: Classics,utopianism and urban planning in early twentieth-century Britain

This article examines the intellectual background to debates in the town planning movement in early twentieth-century Britain. The movement drew heavily on two traditions, that of the anarchists, who provided much of the theory, and that of the philanthropists. The reception of the Classical city influenced these debates through the provision of key paradigms. These paradigms were predominantly sociological rather than architectural and related to the ‘ideal’ societies to be generated by the new cities. The article argues that urban planning followed a path parallel to British sociology in adopting Classical ideas and forming itself around particular Classicising imaginings of society. Whereas the anarchist tradition exploited the Classical cautiously, differentiating the cities of Rome from the Classical poleis of Greece and finding in those Greek traditions the possibility of radical associative democracy, town planners in the British tradition came to engage with the Classical in a very different way. Through figures such as Patrick Geddes, the influence of Classicism served to divest British urban planning of its political radicalism and the Classical polis was used to offer a utopianism which was hierarchical and conservative.     

City streets and the city edition: newsboys and newspapers in early twentieth-century Ireland

This article examines the newsboy as both an important figure of early twentieth-century Irish streets and also a vital final link in the chain of media production and distribution at the time. Despite the advent of industrial communications and manufacturing processes in print culture well before the end of the nineteenth century, newspapers in particular were ultimately dependent upon boys as young as eleven years old to sell copies, especially in urban areas. Newsboys were very visible and audible figures on Irish city streets, and presumably because of this were themselves the subject of frequent newspaper stories. This article explores the way in which newsboys were both part of the newspaper industry while simultaneously being represented in the press as exemplars of the urban working classes for middle-class readers.     

Picturing the homeland: geography and national identity in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in geography as an ideologically loaded discourse about the world and its inhabitants which has operated both within and beyond educational institutions. Particular attention has been paid to the complex relationships between geography and imperialism, militarism and nationalism. For the most part, these studies have focused on the development of a western geographical imagination in Europe and North America. This article considers the development of geography in Iran during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and charts some of the connections between this new spatial sensibility and an emerging Iranian nationalism. Based on rare and hitherto unexplored nineteenth-century Persian sources, including several newspaper images, this article examines the importance which Iranian statesmen and diplomats in the service of the Qajar dynasty attached to geography and to geographical reasoning in their attempts to protect their authority from external threats. The forms of Iranian geography which developed in this period sustained various myths and legends about Persia's historic importance and reflected both external, western ideas and concepts as well as indigenous, Persian traditions. Forged in a context of acute vulnerability to «Great Power» incursions, Iranian nationalism and Iranian geography both represented an intermingling of external, western and internal, non-western ideas.     

Gender in the frame: photography and the performance of the nation narrative in early twentieth-century Ireland

This article considers the role of visualising in the formation of the nation narrative. It foregrounds the significance of gender performance in early twentieth-century Irish cultural nationalism. Prior to the consolidation of a hegemonic narrative of state, spaces existed for the exploration of a range of possible projections of identity. This study focuses on one of those possibilities, namely a series of costume photographs where gender is literally performed. A contextual reading of these photographs is offered in order to situate them within the formation of the nation narrative. The gender of the nation is enacted through performativity, which through its repetition comes to be seen as natural. The photographs under consideration here undermine that process of naturalisation by revealing a more complex and contradictory history of the relationship between gender and nation. The omission of this more complex representation in the Irish narrative, it is argued, reveals how monopoly of narrative is integral to both hegemonic control in the visual field and how we understand the nation.     

The elusive role of scientific medicine in mortality decline: diphtheria in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Philadelphia

The designation of the Klebs-Loeffler bacillus as the cause of diphtheria in the early 1890s and the subsequent development of the antitoxin treatment in the years immediately following were at the time and continue to be viewed as triumphs of scientific medicine. I focus on these two developments to illustrate the problems that arise in attempting to answer the questions regarding the role that changes in medical practice--in this case, the use of antitoxin as a cure--played in lowering death rates at the time. Changes in diagnostic techniques, the selection of cases to be included, and ultimately the agendas of the persons constructing them affected the numerators and denominators of these rates. The data suggest that the antitoxin had some effect on already declining diphtheria death rates, but because of changes in understandings of the disease and contemporaries' presentation of the data, the size of that effect and its role in mortality decline more generally elude us. Our analysis of the past depends on numbers that reflect not only changing treatments but also changing understandings of disease at the end of the nineteenth century.     

Producing citizens, reproducing the "French race": immigration, demography, and pronatalism in early twentieth-century France

This essay examines how, in the context of depopulation and mass immigration, members of the French pronatalist movement advanced a policy favouring immigrants from Italy, Spain, and Poland. Because the 'demographic crisis' created a shortage of citizens as well as workers, pronatalists held that foreign workers must also be assimilable, and able to produce French offspring. While the racial difference of colonial subjects was deemed immutable, pronatalists called for the immigration of white foreigners whose less 'modern' condition promoted fecundity, traditionalism, and gender dimorphism. Evidence is drawn from demographic studies, the press of France's largest pronatalist movement, and a pronatalist advisory committee created by the Ministry of Health in 1920.     

Border crossings: reflections on women's lives in twentieth-century Britain

There has been a growing focus on personal life, memoir and autobiography in feminist writing, and in the social sciences more generally, in recent years. Feminist geographers, among others, argue that family relationships and personal recollections should be part of studies of the construction of personal identity and a sense of place. I combine this argument with research into women's labour market participation to explore the changing significance of waged work in British women's lives over the last century, seen through the personal lens of three generations of women's experiences of migration across geographical and class boundaries.     

Properties of ancient landscape: the present prehistoric in twentieth-century Breckland

The paper considers the presence of prehistory in the Breckland region of East Anglia in the twentieth century, addressing the ways in which ancient landscape became bound up with definitions of regional identity and claims to cultural and/or archaeological authority, and contributing to debate over the animation of landscape. Sites considered include the flint mines of Grimes Graves, with its controversial mid-twentieth-century Neolithic ‘chalk goddess’, and the ancient trackways of the region. Grimes Graves and the Brandon flint-knapping industry focus discussion concerning the poetics of flint. Archaeological debate is set within the wider characterisation of Breckland as a ‘primitive’ landscape. While some found in prehistory equivalents for a progressive modernity, others found an escape from or antidote to a fallen modern world, a sensibility continued in recent imaginings of the ancient landscape. The paper concludes by exploring the parallel presence of the twentieth-century past in the region via selected monuments and relics.     

Place and the Politics of Virtue: Clerical work,corporate anxiety,and changing meanings of public womanhood in early twentieth-century Montreal

Women's entrance into corporate offices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century provided a focus for debate about changing meanings of public womanhood in the 'Modern' city. Working in the financial district, in the heart of downtown, women in clerical professions challenged formulations of respectability which posited public, urban space as threatening to female virtue. Yet the corporations for which these women worked traded quite literally on their reputations, and as such had a great need that their employees of both sexes be understood as respectable and upstanding citizens. Drawing on the popular press and employee files from a selection of key corporations in early twentieth-century Montreal, I examine how women's presence in, and use of urban space was mediated through ideas about 'respectability'. I submit that both corporations and women seeking clerical employment drew on ideas about respectable womanhood based in expectations of corporeal control and sexual restraint, even as these ideas were changing.     

Experts,publics and the environment in the UK: twentieth-century translations

Prompted by contemporary concerns in the West over a global vision of nature and society at risk, this paper builds on recent studies of expertise within a broader public culture. By focusing on earlier episodes of social and political uncertainty, the paper argues that there is scope to extend such analysis in terms of historical geographies of specialist knowledge. The paper examines the formative years of British ecology, a discipline which from its beginnings in the wake of urban industrialism more than a century ago, was centrally concerned with the relations of human well-being and the environment. In exploring when, where and how an ecological expertise became defined, it shifts the focus from familiar milestones in the discipline's public recognition. By tracing the discursive and material practices of those who sought to identify and define ecology as a specialism, the paper illustrates the importance of groupings within and beyond accredited expertise in giving it meaning and purpose. In doing so it highlights the fragility and fluidity of the boundaries around ‘expertise’, and the significance of geographical context and connections in shaping its conduct and content. In terms of broader historical geographies, the paper suggests that while ‘expert’ cultures may be projected as giving greater public reassurance, the sense of certainty that this implies disguises complex processes in which the boundaries are imprecise between specialist and lay knowledge and between scientific and public spaces.     

Landscapes without the car: a counterfactual historical geography of twentieth-century Britain

Despite increased concern about environmental damage and resource depletion, the private motor car, and associated automobility, are taken-for-granted aspects of twenty-first-century life. This paper makes the counterfactual assumption that private ownership of cars was severely restricted at the start of the twentieth century, and uses a range of historical data to examine the ways in which such a scenario might have impacted on transport infrastructure, personal mobility and urban life. It is argued that, even without the wholesale adoption of the motor car as a means of personal transport, patterns of everyday mobility would not have differed significantly from today so long as other forms of transport had remained or expanded to cope with this demand. However, such a scenario would probably have required journeys to be planned in different ways, may have been qualitatively different from travel today, and could have disadvantaged particular groups of the population, including some women. A landscape without cars would probably also have altered the form of cities, with services provided closer to where people live, and levels of air pollution substantially lower. The counterfactual historical analysis is used to argue that, although there is little likelihood of cars being banned in Britain, greater restrictions on private motor vehicles would not necessarily lead to the fundamental changes in everyday mobility that some might predict.     

Citizenship as contingent national belonging: married women and foreigners in twentieth-century Switzerland

The relationship between marriage and citizenship was implicit in the practices of most democratic states during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The policy of depriving women who married foreigners of their citizenship was legally codified only with the process of 'nationalisation'. In the particular case of Switzerland, the practice was not codified until 1941, at the height of the movement of peoples unleashed by the Second World War, and it was only fully dismantled in the 1990s. This article analyses the discursive webs linking gender construction, nation state and legal system during the controversies surrounding the marriage rule in Switzerland between 1917 and 1952. It explores the formative role of gender in the process of delineating the practices of inclusion and exclusion and in shaping the internal boundaries within the nation between foreigners and those who belonged: citizens.     

Music in factories: a twentieth-century technique for control of the productive self

This paper discusses the historical use of music to produce more efficient, more committed, industrial workers. First emerging in academia early in the twentieth century, psychological interest in the industrial application of music had grown into a topic of popular interest and government investigation by the 1940s. Catalysed by the need for vast increases in production and the desire to cultivate ‘citizenship’ amongst industrial workers which the Second World War produced, consideration of how music could be employed as an affective soundtrack in factories—to raise employees' work rates, to increase their efficiency, to combat fatigue and boredom, to improve morale, to access and manipulate their emotions and loyalties—became a prominent area of psychological research. This paper examines that psychological research and its largest scale application in the BBC radio show Music While You Work, broadcast daily to millions of British factory workers from 1940 until 1967. The paper focuses particularly on conceptualizations of music's affective power and its utilization to exert ‘emotional control’ over spaces of work and the working self. This paper is centrally concerned with the practice of Music While You Work as a programme broadcasting specifically for factory spaces, and how this confronted the BBC's music policies for a national and domestic audience, impacting on the radical nature of the affective soundtrack to work which was produced.