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The Socialist Good Life
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 257

The Socialist Good Life

What does the good life mean in a "backward" place? As communist regimes denigrated widespread unemployment and consumer excess in Western countries, socialist Eastern European states simultaneously legitimized their power through their apparent ability to satisfy consumers' needs. Moving beyond binaries of production and consumption, the essays collected here examine the lessons consumption studies can offer about ethnic and national identity and the role of economic expertise in shaping consumer behavior. From Polish VCRs to Ukrainian fashion boutiques, tropical fruits in the GDR to cinemas in Belgrade, The Socialist Good Life explores what consumption means in a worker state where communist ideology emphasizes collective needs over individual pleasures.

A Concise Survey of Western Civilization
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 391

A Concise Survey of Western Civilization

This lively text offers a brief history of Western civilization. Providing a focused narrative and interpretive structure, Pavlac uses the joined terms “supremacies and diversities” to develop themes of conflict and creativity. His easily accessible yet deeply knowledgeable book covers the basic information that all educated adults should know.

Relations and Roles in China's Internationalism
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 376

Relations and Roles in China's Internationalism

Pluriversalism within International Relations and the literature on Chinese international relations each embrace ideas of relation and difference. While they similarly strive for recognition by Western academics, they do not seriously engage with each other. To the extent that either succeeds in winning recognition, it ironically reproduces Western centrism and the binary of the Western versus the non-Western. In Relations and Roles in China's Internationalism, author Chih-yu Shih demonstrates, through a critical translation exercise, that Confucian themes enable both the critique and realignment of liberal thought, allowing all of us, including the members of Confucianism and the neo-liberal order, to understand how we adapt to and coexist with each another. In the end, Confucianism not only informs the pluriversal necessity that all are bound to be related but also de-nationalizes China's internationalism.

The Palgrave Handbook of Communist Women Activists around the World
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 706

The Palgrave Handbook of Communist Women Activists around the World

This Handbook addresses the role of women in communism as a global, social and political movement for the first time, exploring their lives, forms of activism, political strategies and transnational networks. Comprising twenty-five chapters, based on new and primary research, the book presents the lives of self-identified communist women from a truly international perspective and outlines their struggles against fascism and colonialism, and for women’s emancipation and national liberation. By using the lens of transnational political biography, the chapters capture the broader picture of these women’s lives, unpacking the links between the so-called public and private, the power structur...

Post-communist Nostalgia
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 310

Post-communist Nostalgia

Although the end of the Cold War was greeted with great enthusiasm by people in the East and the West, the ensuing social and especially economic changes did not always result in the hoped-for improvements in people's lives. This led to widespread disillusionment that can be observed today all across Eastern Europe. Not simply a longing for security, stability, and prosperity, this nostalgia is also a sense of loss regarding a specific form of sociability. Even some of those who opposed communism express a desire to invest their new lives with renewed meaning and dignity. Among the younger generation, it surfaces as a tentative yet growing curiosity about the recent past. In this volume scho...

Ionel Bratianu
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 191

Ionel Bratianu

At the beginning of 1918 the British War Cabinet endorsed the view of the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, that after the war "Austria-Hungary should be in a position to exercise a powerful influence in south-east Europe." These reassuring professions were the essence of hypocrisy, since the Allies had already given away, at least on paper, large chunks of Austro-Hungarian territory as bribes to potential allies. In 1916 Romania was promised the whole of Transylvania, the Banat - both components of historic Hungary - and the Bukovina in return for her entry into the war. These promises persuaded the Romanian Prime Minister Ion Bratianu (1864-1927) to intervene in the war on the side of the Allies in 1916. He lead the Romanian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, where he insisted on those promises to be fulfilled. His often-strained relations with the Big Four and the Supreme Council were further eroded when Romania invaded Hungary. Romania, however, in the end signed and adhered to the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye with Austria, Neuilly-sur-Seine with Bulgaria, the Treaty of Paris (1920), the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary, and the minorities treaty.

Technological Innovation, Modernity, and Electric Goods in Late State Socialist Poland
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 195

Technological Innovation, Modernity, and Electric Goods in Late State Socialist Poland

Technological Innovation, Modernity, and Electric Goods in Late State Socialist Poland deconstructs the public performance of technological innovation and imagined modernity in relation to the home technologies market in late state socialist Poland. While doing so, Patryk Wasiak sheds light on the politics that accompanied the modes of representations of the new innovative consumer technologies in the public sphere and the agenda of actors who performed such representations. This book argues that the central form of the mediation of home technologies was the projection of specific “sociotechnical imaginaries” that included visions of how these technologies would have an impact on the cre...

A Concise Survey of Western Civilization, Combined Edition
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 619

A Concise Survey of Western Civilization, Combined Edition

This book gives a brief, readable description of our common Western heritage. It covers the minimum historical information that educated adults should know within a tightly-focused narrative and interpretive structure. The joined terms “supremacies and diversities” develop major themes of conflict and creativity. “Supremacies” centers on the use of power to dominate societies, ranging from warfare to ideologies. Supremacy seeks stability, order, and incorporation. “Diversities” encompasses the creative impulse that produces new ideas, as well as people’s efforts to define themselves as “different.” Diversity creates change, opportunity, and individuality. These themes of hi...

A Concise Survey of Western Civilization
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 464

A Concise Survey of Western Civilization

That First Kiss and Other Stories is connected to part 1 of the Catechism, "The Profession of Faith."These thirteen stories correspond to sections of the Apostles' Creed. The characters in this collection of stories experience wonder and struggle, hurt and forgiveness, failure and success, and tears and laughter. You will enjoy them as wonderful stories about the joys and struggles of growing. And if you wish, they can serve as a starting point for searching out your own answers about life, God, and faith.

Everyday Postsocialism in Eastern Europe
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 213

Everyday Postsocialism in Eastern Europe

The collapse of state socialism ushered in dramatic political and economic change, producing new freedoms and opportunities, but also new challenges and disappointments. Focusing on laborers, professionals, youth, women, sexual minorities, foreign students, and emigrants, Everyday Postsocialism in Eastern Europe explores these multifaceted changes and people’s varied experiences of them. The featured narratives complicate hegemonic representations of transformation, revealing ruptures and continuities, progress and reversals. Highlighting the multi-directionality of change over the last thirty years, the book reappraises 1989 as an epochal event for all.