The Production and Display of Domestic Interiors in Wilhelmine Germany, 1900-1914

In the opening years of the twentieth century, the German homeassumed new cultural meanings and symbolic significance as asite of economic, political, artistic, and social intervention.This article investigates a range of Wilhelmine institutions—fromthe Wertheim department store and the Prussian Commerce Ministry,to the Applied Arts Movement and the Movement for Art Education—toillustrate the variety of German approaches to promoting newconceptions of the home. Examining the ways in which Wilhelmineprivate and state reformers turned the topic of how one livedand dwelled into a topic of pressing significance, the articleargues that private, commercial efforts and state-driven policyinitiatives interpenetrated to a degree previously underappreciatedin Wilhelmine historical studies. These private and state initiativeswere, in turn, closely tied to the cultivation of German consumeridentities, and to larger efforts on the part of Wilhelmineinstitutions to adapt to the dizzying conditions of twentieth-centurycapitalist modernity. As a result of these developments, specialexhibitions of artistic home interiors originated in premierGerman department stores as well as in the halls of the statebureaucracy; historical ornaments termed ‘modern’in one decade were denigrated as barbaric in another; and generationsof craftsmen battled one another for a legitimacy conferred,to a significant degree, by private commissions, generous statesubsidies, and admission into prestigious exhibitions.     

Correction in the Countryside: Convict Labour in Rural Germany 1871-1914

Over the course of the Empire demand for labour in the countrysideand penal reform together created the conditions for a greaterdeployment of prisoners, workhouse inmates and young offendersin agriculture. Farming on site, and especially leasing offenders,were the most cost-efficient ways of detaining men. Agriculturalwork was also regarded as key to their rehabilitation. It servedto equip inmates upon release for the sector of the economymost in need of workers. ‘Outside work’ away fromthe institution was also seen as an intermediate stage in theprisoner's sentence before release. Two developments in thecharitable sector complemented this correctional strategy: theemergence of a network of workers’ farming colonies whichacted as half-way houses for ex-prisoners after release, andex-offender employment programmes run by prisoner welfare societies,channelling ex-offenders towards agricultural employment. Despitethese efforts to reintegrate offenders, re-offending rates remainedhigh. Penal authorities either attributed this to the incorrigibilityof some inmates, or pushed for longer sentences. In some casespenal and medical authorities were inclined to re-interpretthe criminal behaviour of repeat offenders as behaviour symptomaticof mental illness, and some inmates were transferred to asylums.In the discourse surrounding the failure of reform the argumentthat the exclusionary and punitive nature of the prison andworkhouse régime actually worked against rehabilitationheld little sway, nor the argument that high re-offending ratescould be attributed to the vagrancy and begging laws which criminalizedsystemic poverty and homelessness. Absent here was any understandingthat the life offered following release, working as ancillaryworkers or hands on the estates, bore too striking a resemblanceto work in agriculture during detention. This in itself wasone major reason why many ex-offenders directed into agriculturalemployment after release refused to stay and work.     

MacDonald's Parties: The Labour Party and the 'Aristocratic Embrace', 1922-31

The article tests the claim that certain Labour MPs and ministersin the 1920s succumbed to an ‘aristocratic embrace’.It begins with a short account of debates in the early LabourParty over social mixing, which culminated in the 1924 disputeover the wearing of Court Dress by some Labour ministers. Theextent of ‘embrace’ is assessed through the examinationof who wore Court Dress (and why), who was offered and acceptedhonours, and of patterns of residence, income and wealth, andparticipation in London Society, measured by club membershipsand appearances in the Court & Social columns of The Times.The article concludes by examining the usefulness of the ideaof ‘aristocratic embrace’ in explaining the defectionof J.R. MacDonald and others from the Labour Party in 1931.     

The British government,child welfare,and child migration to Australia after 1945

In 1943, the British Colonial Office initiated a far-reaching process of arrangements to prepare plans for detailed reconstruction in the territories subject to British control. Reconstruction as a concept, a tendency and an action plan was basically directed at building and constructing that which had been destroyed in the war, based on a plan thought out in advance. This article explores the struggle between the British plan for the reconstruction of Mandatory Palestine and the Jewish interpretation that the main aim of their steps is to implement the White Paper policy of May 1939. After six months of confrontation, the British intention to promote economic steps while presenting them as separate from the political tension over Palestine's political future and the Jewish-Arab confrontation proved to be a false assumption.     

Neo-Canadians and Schools in Montreal, 1900-1970

Immigrants' involvement in Quebec's unique confessional educational system is viewed through the experience of the important Jewish and Italian communities. This discussion illustrates the degree to which the two “host” communities, French and English, were unwilling to alter their religious or nationalist doctrines and institutional structures in order to accommodate other ethnic groups.