Focusing on five European countries, this book explores the role that stamps play in shaping and reflecting national identity and the way they reflect the fundamental design developments within their period. It reveals how national icons evolve and how commemmorative issues reflect fundamental design as well as creative concerns. It also highlights the role of the stamp designers, showing how many famous artists, including M.C. Escher, Hans Erne, Edmund Doulac, David Gentleman and Eric Gill, have contributed to the development of stamp design. A whole chapter is devoted to the design of British and French colonial issues.
European Stamp Issues and the First World War takes a new approach to the dramatic storyof the continental empires and nations who became embroiled in the Great War that eventuallytransformed Europe and created a new patchwork of countries seething with jealousiesand discontent.It does so using the unique perspectives provided by the philatelic images through whicheach nation projected its vision of itself through the ruling dynasties, military triumphs, breathtakingscenery, cultural achievements and technical advances it chose to highlight. Duringthe uncertain and traumatic decades surrounding the Great War, nothing identified theaspirations and anxieties of a country more than its succession of stamp designs - some verydramatic, others subtle.Eye-catching new issues were powerful instruments of propaganda as well as revenue.In victory, stamps celebrated the acquisition of new territory, and in adversity they urged unityand promoted charities. From 1918 numerous stamps tracked the savage Red and WhiteRussian Civil War. And, as the great empires collapsed, countries such as Czechoslovakia,Poland and the Baltic States emerged eager to promote their history, culture and independence.While many French and Belgian stamps showed these war-torn nations nursing theirrecovery, issues in Germany highlighted how its post-war chaos hardened into a new nationalidentity. And across the Balkans lengthy sets reflected the deep divisions within and betweenthe Slav nations that preceded and long outlasted the First World War.This unparalleled book provides a fascinating portrait of the turbulent decades of theearly twentieth century, revealed through miniature works of art that are in themselvesimportant historical sources.
A superb introduction to the timeless struggle to understand human nature, this book compresses into a small volume the essence of such thinkers as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Jean Paul Sartre, B.F. Skinner, and Plato.
Today, European nations still use stamps to commemorate aspects of a nation's culture, history and achievements. During the Second World War, however, stamps were considered far more important in conveying political and ideological messages about their country's change in fortunes – whether it was as triumphant occupier, willing or unwilling ally, or oppressed victim. Some issues and overprints contained obvious messages, but many others were skillfully designed and subtle in their intentions. Stamps and their accompanying postmarks offer an absorbing and surprisingly detailed insight into the hopes and fears of nations at this tumultuous time. This remarkable collection examines and interprets the stamps of twenty-two countries across western and eastern Europe. The glorification of the Führer and Germany on the stamps of countries he most oppressed was inevitable, but many issues are ambiguous and indicative of the rival ethnic and political forces striving to attain influence and power. Desperate to unite the people, Soviet Russia resorted to images of the nation's heroic achievements under the Tsars; the mutually hostile puppet states Hitler and Mussolini allowed to emerge out of conquered Yugoslavia lost no time in issuing stamps proclaiming their cultural diversity; and Vichy France sought to justify its existence with issues linking past glories under Louis XIV and Napoleon with an equally glorious future alongside Hitler. These and many more stories reveal the aspirations, assumptions and anxieties of so many nations as their destinies hung in the balance.
"Today, European nations still use stamps to commemorate aspects of a nation's culture, history and achievements. During the Second World War, however, stamps were considered far more important in conveying political and ideological messages about their country's change in fortunes- whether it was as triumphant occupier, willing or unwilling ally, or oppressed victim. Some issues and overprints contained obvious messages, but many others were skilfully designed and subtle in their intentions. Stamps and their accompanying postmarks offer an absorbing and surprisingly detailed insight into the hopes and fears of nations at this tumultuous time. This remarkable collection examines and interprets the stamps of twenty-two countries across western and eastern Europe."--
Today, the environment seems omnipresent in European policy within and beyond the European Union. The idea of a shared European environment, however, has come a long way and is still being contested. Greening Europe focuses on the many ways people have interacted with nature and made it an issue of European concern. The authors ask how notions of Europe mattered in these activities and they expose the many entanglements of activists across the subcontinent who set out to connect and network, and to exchange knowledge, worldviews, and strategies that exceeded their national horizons. Moving beyond human agency, the handbook also highlights the eminent role nature played in both "greening" Europe and making Europe a shared environment.
Considers how our ideas about mathematics shape our individual and cultural relationship to the field. Where and how do we, as a culture, get our ideas about mathematics and about who can engage with mathematical knowledge? Sara N. Hottinger uses a cultural studies approach to address how our ideas about mathematics shape our individual and cultural relationship to the field. She considers four locations in which representations of mathematics contribute to our cultural understanding of mathematics: mathematics textbooks, the history of mathematics, portraits of mathematicians, and the field of ethnomathematics. Hottinger examines how these discourses shape mathematical subjectivity by limiting the way some groupsincluding women and people of colorare able to see themselves as practitioners of math. Inventing the Mathematician provides a blueprint for how to engage in a deconstructive project, revealing the limited and problematic nature of the normative construction of mathematical subjectivity.
Complete coverage of basic design principles illustrated by student examples Design for Communication offers a unique approach to mastering the basic design principles, conceptual problem-solving methods, and critical-thinking skills that distinguish graphic designers from desktop technicians. This book presents forty-two basic to advanced graphic design and typography assignments collaboratively written by college educators to teach the fundamental processes, concepts, and techniques through hands-on applications. Each assignment is illustrated with actual student solutions, and each includes a process narrative and an educator's critical analysis revealing the reasoning behind the creative strategies employed by each individual student solution. Assignments are organized from basic to advanced within six sections: * The elements and principles of design * Typography as image * Creative word play * Word and image * Grid and visual hierarchy * Visual advocacy Design for Communication is a highly visual resource of instruction, information, ideas, and inspiration for students and professionals.
Networks of Design maps a new methodological territory in design studies, conceived as a field of interdisciplinary inquiry and practice informed by a range of responses to actor network theory. It brings together a rich body of current work by researchers in the social sciences, technology, material culture, cultural geography, information technology, and systems design, and design theory and history. This collection will be invaluable to students and researchers in many areas of design studies and to design practitioners receptive to new and challenging notions of what constitutes the design process. Over ninety essays are thematically organised to address five aspects of the expanded notions of mediation, agency, and collaboration posited by network theory: Ideas, Things, Technology, Texts, and People. The collection also includes an important new essay on rethinking the concept of design by Bruno Latour, one of the most influential figures in the philosophy and sociology of science and technology and a pioneer of actor network theory, and essays deriving from forum discussions involving designers and designer-makers responsive to actor network theory. Rather than an anthology of previously-published essays, Networks of Design presents work in progress on design theory and its applications. It is the outcome of a live and vigorous debate on the possibilities and actualities offered by actor network led conceptualisations of the relationships and processes constituting design. All the essays, many collaborative, derive from papers presented at the international conference of the Design History Society held at University College Falmouth, UK in the Autumn of 2008.
