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During the interwar years, broadcast radio became a popular way for Europeans to consume local, national, and international news. The medium not only began to shape European policy and politics, but also laid the foundation for European unification and global interconnectedness. In Europe On Air, Suzanne Lommers has documented the rich and often underexposed history of broadcast radio through the lens of international European relations. She specifically explores the roles of Radio Moscow, Radio Luxembourg, Vatican Radio, and the International Broadcasting Union as institutions that played an important role in national identities and establishing standards for broadcasting. The radio also offered new opportunities to politicians, who seized upon a vibrant and more direct way to communicate with their constituents. Essential reading for scholars of technology and European history, Europe-On Air reveals broadcast radio to be a technology that revolutionized international relations during the brief respite between the chaos of war in Europe.
During the 1920s and 1930s the new medium of radio broadcasting promised to transform society by fostering national unity and strengthening and popularising national cultures. However, many hoped that 'wireless' would also encourage international understanding and world peace. Intentionally or otherwise, wireless signals crossed borders, bringing talk, music, and news to enthusiastic 'distant listeners' in other countries. In Europe, radio was regulated through international consultation and cooperation, to restrict interference between stations, and to unleash the medium's full potential to carry programmes to global audiences. A distinctive form of 'wireless internationalism' emerged, refl...
In ten original essays, Danish music and media scholars discuss aspects of music on the radio from the 1920s until today. Understanding music radio as a distributed phenomenon or as a multiplicity, the authors draw upon anthropology, cultural studies and media studies along with sociological and historiographical theory. The intention is to further develop interdisciplinary approaches that may grasp the complex interrelations between radio as an institution and as practices on the one hand and music, musical practices, and musical life on the other. The essays' examples and cases are all related to the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) and offer a music radio production perspective. They ...
Lard, Lice and Longevity reconstructs economic policies implemented in Denmark and the Netherlands during the German occupation. It clearly shows that the experiences of both these countries during World War I, and during the 1930s equipped them to introduce extensive and intrusive economic controls to ward off a subsistence crisis. In spite of the strong similarities between the two countries in terms of policies and economic order, there remains a glaring difference between the two. Throughout the occupation years, the Netherlands suffered a markedly higher level of child mortality than before or after the war, caused by an upsurge of infectious diseases. Child health in Denmark, on the other hand, declined during the occupation years, and infectious diseases rose only marginally there. In spite of similar policies, hence, the outcome in terms of the biological standard of living was dissimilar. By closely investigating the impact of various policies on everyday life, and the amounts of goods available to different groups of consumers, this study identifies the causes of this remarkable divergence.
Conventional histories portray the development of railway infrastructures as a tool to build empires and nation states. Recent scholarship however, has stressed the importance of a transnational perspective beyond an exclusive focus on the nation state. The new perspective enriches both the history of modern Europe and European integration. Constructing Iron Europe demonstrates how during the interwar years key players saw railroads as instruments for building a transnational European community. Based on new archival research, Anastasiadou not only sheds light on patterns of internationalization of railways, but also explores the co-construction of the national and the European in the case of the Greek railways in the Interbellum period. Foundation for the History of Technology & Amsterdam University Press Technology and European History Series (TEHS)
This book focuses on two commercial radio stations, Radio Luxembourg and Europe n°1, which were popular institutions in Western Europe throughout the Long Sixties, working across media and broadcasting transnationally. It argues that the existence of an overarching ‘dispositif ’ of commercial radio stations enabled them to operate on various dimensions and differentiated them from other broadcasters. The book therefore answers current calls in media history to look beyond national and single-medium borders and contributes to the cultural and media history of Western Europe.
As media environments and communication practices evolve over time, so do theoretical concepts. This book analyzes some of the most well-known and fiercely discussed concepts of the digital age from a historical perspective, showing how many of them have pre-digital roots and how they have changed and still are constantly changing in the digital era. Written by leading authors in media and communication studies, the chapters historicize 16 concepts that have become central in the digital media literature, focusing on three main areas. The first part, Technologies and Connections, historicises concepts like network, media convergence, multimedia, interactivity and artificial intelligence. The...
"A new global history of nationalism. Today, almost all countries are considered nation-states, but only a handful conform to the original nationalist ideal of a unitary state which governs an ethnically homogenous nation, an ideal which has rarely been realized in the past. Given this disjunction between the ideal and reality, what explains the extraordinary success of the nation-state model - a form of statehood based on popular sovereignty - and the seductive power of the myth of national homogeneity? Most existing studies focus on the activities of nationalist movements, their views on the nation's identity and the wars and revolutions that produced nation-states. This has served to over...
Hacking Europe traces the user practices of chopping games in Warsaw, hacking software in Athens, creating chaos in Hamburg, producing demos in Turku, and partying with computing in Zagreb and Amsterdam. Focusing on several European countries at the end of the Cold War, the book shows the digital development was not an exclusively American affair. Local hacker communities appropriated the computer and forged new cultures around it like the hackers in Yugoslavia, Poland and Finland, who showed off their tricks and creating distinct “demoscenes.” Together the essays reflect a diverse palette of cultural practices by which European users domesticated computer technologies. Each chapter explores the mediating actors instrumental in introducing and spreading the cultures of computing around Europe. More generally, the “ludological” element--the role of mischief, humor, and play--discussed here as crucial for analysis of hacker culture, opens new vistas for the study of the history of technology.
An investigation of borders as moving entities that influence our notions of territory, authority, sovereignty, and jurisdiction. In Borders as Infrastructure, Huub Dijstelbloem brings science and technology studies, as well as the philosophy of technology, to the study of borders and international human mobility. Taking Europe's borders as a point of departure, he shows how borders can transform and multiply and and how they can mark conflicts over international orders. Borders themselves are moving entities, he claims, and with them travel our notions of territory, authority, sovereignty, and jurisdiction. The philosophies of Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk provide a framework for Dijste...