People eat and drink very differently throughout their life. Each stage has diets with specific ingredients, preparations, palates, meanings and settings. Moreover, physicians, authorities and general observers have particular views on what and how to eat according to age. All this has changed frequently during the previous two centuries. Infant feeding has for a long time attracted historical attention, but interest in the diets of youngsters, adults of various ages, and elderly people seems to have dissolved into more general food historiography. This volume puts age on the agenda of food history by focusing on the very diverse diets throughout the lifecycle.
Food consumption and nutrition are historically among the most characteristic features of inequality in living standards driven by socioeconomic, gender, generational and geographical reasons. Nutrition directly impacts mortality, life expectancy, height and illness and thus becomes a good indicator of living standards and their evolution over time. However, one issue that remains unresolved is how to measure past diet inequalities with the available sources. This book evaluates nutritional inequalities in Spain from the nineteenth century to the present day. It explores the socioeconomic, gender, generational and geographical variations in food consumption and nutrition in Spain during this period. Deriving historical data on nutrition and diet has always been difficult due to issues with available sources. This book adopts a multi-dimensional approach and two complementary methodologies capable of presenting a more comprehensive picture: the first analyses diets based on primary sources, while the second examines the effect of nutritional inequalities on biological living standards, with special emphasis on average height. This combination allows for greater precision than previous studies on the impacts of food inequality. This book will be of significant interest to scholars from different academic branches, especially historians, economic historians and historians of science, economists, and also doctors, endocrinologists, paediatricians, anthropologists, nutritionists and expert in cooperation and development.
The Cold War is conventionally regarded as a superpower conflict that dominated the shape of international relations between World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Smaller powers had to adapt to a role as pawns in a strategic game of the superpowers, its course beyond their control. This edited volume offers a fresh interpretation of twentieth-century smaller European powers – East–West, neutral and non-aligned – and argues that their position vis-à-vis the superpowers often provided them with an opportunity rather than merely representing a constraint. Analysing the margins for manoeuvre of these smaller powers, the volume covers a wide array of themes, ranging from cultural to economic issues, energy to diplomacy and Bulgaria to Belgium. Given its holistic and nuanced intervention in studies of the Cold War, this book will be instrumental for students of history, international relations and political science.
This book looks at the roots of a global visual news culture: the trade in illustrations of the news between European illustrated newspapers in the mid-nineteenth century. In the age of nationalism, we might suspect these publications to be filled with nationally produced content, supporting a national imagined community. However, the large-scale transnational trade in illustrations, which this book uncovers, points out that nineteenth-century news consumers already looked at the same world. By exchanging images, European illustrated newspapers provided them with a shared, transnational, experience.
National indifference is one of the most innovative notions historians have brought to the study of nationalism in recent years. The concept questions the mass character of nationalism in East Central Europe at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Ordinary people were not in thrall to the nation; they were often indifferent, ambivalent or opportunistic when dealing with issues of nationhood. As with all ground-breaking research, the literature on national indifference has not only revolutionized how we understand nationalism, over time, it has also revealed a new set of challenges. This volume brings together experienced scholars with the next generation, in a collaborative effort to push the geographic, historical, and conceptual boundaries of national indifference 2.0.
The "new mobilities paradigm" which emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century has identified mobility as a process intrinsic to the human experience and fundamental to the formation of social and political structures. This volume breaks new ground by demonstrating the role of the journey as a key motor of human development in Russia, central and east Europe in the modern period. It does so by means of twelve case studies that examine different types of movement, both voluntary and involuntary, temporary and permanent, short- and long-distance, into, out of, and around the region.
This volume provides the English-speaking reader with little-known perspectives of Central and Eastern European historians on the topic of the Russian Revolution. Whereas research into the Soviet Union’s history has flourished at Western universities, the contribution of Central and Eastern European historians, during the Cold War working in conditions of imposed censorship, to this field of academic research has often been seriously circumscribed. Bringing together perspectives from across Central and Eastern Europe alongside contributions from established scholars from the West, this significant volume casts the year 1917 in a new critical light.
Strange Allies examines three intersecting themes of fundamental importance to the international history of the period between the two world wars. First, and most broadly, it is a study of the international history of the pivotal ‘hinge years’, running from the onset of the Depression in late 1929 to the Nazi capture of power in Germany in early 1933. The second theme is the strategic relationship between Britain and France, the critical dynamic in the management of global and European international relations during this time of great fluidity and uncertainty. The most contentious and intractable issue that divided the two countries was the pursuit of international disarmament, which forms the third theme of the book. Strange Allies is based upon extensive research in British and French archives, as well as in the archives of the League of Nations in Geneva. The book’s focus on 1929–31 in particular makes a major contribution to the international history of the interwar period by re-examining the security and strategic policies of the second Labour government in Britain and of foreign minister Aristide Briand in the post-Locarno years in France. For 1931–33, the book looks at the impact of the great financial and economic crisis of 1931 on security and disarmament planning in Britain and France. It then considers the impact of the Anglo-French relationship on the instability of Europe and on the failure of the World Disarmament Conference. This book is the first detailed study of the Anglo-French relationship during a critical period which saw a reshaping of the boundaries of global security. Although the Anglo-French alliance is rightly seen to be pivotal to both the initial phase of implementing the Versailles settlement of 1919 and the efforts to contain Hitler and protect Europe after 1936, Strange Allies demonstrates the degree to which these states’ conflicting views of security were central to international relations in the years leading up to Hitler’s accession to power.
Back in 1989, many anticipated that the end of the Cold War would usher in the ‘end of history’ characterized by the victory of democracy and capitalism. At the thirtieth anniversary of this momentous event, this book challenges this assumption. It studies the most recent era of contemporary European history in order to analyse the impact, consequences and legacy of the end of the Cold War for Western Europe. Bringing together leading scholars on the topic, the volume answers the question of how the end of the Cold War has affected Western Europe and reveals how it accelerated and reinforced processes that shaped the fragile (geo-)political and economic order of the continent today. In four thematic sections, the book analyses the changing position of Germany in Europe; studies the transformation of neoliberal capitalism; answers the question how Western Europe faced the geopolitical challenges after the Berlin Wall came down; and investigates the crisis of representative democracy. As such, the book provides a comprehensive and novel historical perspective on Europe since the late 1980s.
Just as Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was seeking re-election on a campaign of "no experiments," art avant-garde groups in West Germany were reviving the utopian impulse to unite art and society. Utopia and Dissent in West Germany examines these groups and their legacy. Postwar artists built international as well as intergenerational networks such as Fluxus, which was active in Düsseldorf, Wiesbaden, and Cologne, and the Situationist International based in Paris. These groups were committed to undoing the compartmentalization of everyday life and the isolation of the artist in society. And as artists recast politics to address culture and everyday life, they helped forge a path for the West German extraparliamentary left. Utopia and Dissent in West Germany traces these connections and presents a chronological map of the networks that fed into the extraparliamentary left as well as a geographical map of increasing radicalism as the locus of action shifted to West Berlin. These two maps show that in West Germany artists and their interventions in the structures of everyday life were a key starting point for challenging the postwar order.
