BiblioVault - Books about Twentieth Century

Ukrainian Otherlands

Diaspora, Homeland, and Folk Imagination in the Twentieth Century

Natalia Khanenko-Friesen

University of Wisconsin Press, 2015

What happens to ethnic communities when they have two homelands to love—one real and immediate, the other distant but treasured in the heart and imagination?

Ukrainian Otherlands is an innovative exploration of modern ethnic identity, focused on diaspora/homeland understandings of each other in Ukraine and in Ukrainian ethnic communities around the globe. Exploring a rich array of folk songs, poetry and stories, trans-Atlantic correspondence, family histories, and rituals of homecoming and hosting that developed in the Ukrainian diaspora and Ukraine during the twentieth century, Natalia Khanenko-Friesen asserts that many important aspects of modern ethnic identity form, develop, and reveal themselves not only through the diaspora's continued yearning for the homeland, but also in a homeland's deeply felt connection to its diaspora. Yet, she finds each group imagines the "otherland" and ethnic identity differently, leading to misunderstandings between Ukrainians and their ethnic-Ukrainian "brothers and sisters" abroad.

An innovative exploration of the persistence of vernacular culture in the modern world, Ukrainian Otherlands, amply informed by theory and fieldwork, will appeal to those interested in folklore, ethnic and diaspora studies, modernity, migration, folk psychology, history, and cultural anthropology.

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Uncertain Dimensions

Western Overseas Empires in the Twentieth Century

Raymond F. Betts

University of Minnesota Press, 1985

Uncertain Dimensions was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

World War I battered the Western imperial systems and destroyed one, that of Germany, but it did not sound the death knell of an empire. The "scramble" for overseas territory ha reached a virtual conclusion shortly before the war; afterwards, the main business of empire was to ensure a pax colonia: the often contradictory goals of a stable government and economic development. It is with the years between world wars—the brief age of administrative empire — that Raymond Betts is chiefly concerned in this book. An unsettled time, when individuals coped with empire of uncertain dimensions, the interwar years nonetheless left a material legacy—railroads, motor roads, public buildings — and an ideological one—the voices of protest that led to independence after World War II.

Preeminently a cultural history of the era rather than a political narrative, Uncertain Dimensions centers upon the regions we now call the Third World—Subsaharan Africa and Southeast Asia—and the major colonial powers, Great Britain and France. Betts has structured this book as a group of closely linked interpretive essays, each devoted to a specific aspect of the late colonial experience: World War I and the postwar mandates, colonial administration, the European economic imperative and "technology transfer," urbanization, anti-imperial protest, and decolonization. Throughout, he draws upon the work of novelists, poets, and theoreticians—Aime Cesaire, Claude McKay, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and many others—and recognizes the deep irony at the heart of modern imperialism: that contact between Western and Third worlds was mostly confined to two minorities, the alien European and the socially uprooted African or Asian.

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The University of Iowa in the Twentieth Century

An Institutional History

Stow Persons

University of Iowa Press, 1990

In order to write this exhaustive history, Persons focused his research on the extensive university archive of personal correspondence and reminiscences. The result is a study rich in personality, character, and insight, complete with political and economic drama. The definitive analytical history of the school, this volume captures the vigor and color of the people it chronicles.

Organized by president, this history follows the school’s struggle to establish a major public university in an agricultural state. Persons shows how George MacLean introduced the institutional forms of the modern university and oriented it toward the major state university of the upper Midwest. Walter Jessup was successful in strengthening the faculty and laying the foundations of the modern physical plant. Howard Bowne’s attempt to revivify the school was cut short by the campus uprisings of 1968 to 1970. Since no part of the university has undergone more striking changes than the College of Medicine, Persons has devoted a chapter to the efforts to find an effective organizational pattern for that college. And, in the area of undergraduate education, he outlines the struggle to define and implement a successful general education program.

More than just a recounting of past issues and accomplishments, The University of Iowa in the Twentieth Century also serves to identify a pattern of historical development which will provide a context in which the present issues facing the school can be most fruitfully addressed. This book should be read by everyone interested in the development of the university, educators, higher education administrators, and all those captivated by Iowa history.

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Urban Leviathan

Mexico City in the Twentieth Century

Diane E. Davis

Temple University Press, 1994

Why, Diane Davis asks, has Mexico City, once known as the city of palaces, turned into a sea of people, poverty, and pollution? Through historical analysis of Mexico City, Davis identifies political actors responsible for the uncontrolled industrialization of Mexico's economic and social center, its capital city. This narrative biography takes a perspective rarely found in studies of third-world urban development: Davis demonstrates how and why local politics can run counter to rational politics, yet become enmeshed, spawning ineffective policies that are detrimental to the city and the nation.

The competing social and economic demand of the working poor and middle classes and the desires of Mexico's ruling Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI) have led to gravely diminished services, exorbitant infrastructural expenditures, and counter-productive use of geographic space. Though Mexico City's urban transport system has evolved over the past seven decades from trolley to bus to METRO (subway), it fails to meet the needs of the population, despite its costliness, and is indicative of the city's disastrous and ill-directed overdevelopment. Examining the political forces behind the thwarted attempts to provide transportation in the downtown and sprawling outer residential areas, Davis analyzes the maneuverings of local and national politicians, foreign investors, middle classes, agency bureaucrats, and various factions of the PRI.

Looking to Mexico's future, Davis concludes that growing popular dissatisfaction and frequent urban protests demanding both democratic reform and administrative autonomy in the capital city suggest an unstable future for corporatist politics and the PRI's centralized one-party government.

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Utah in the Twentieth Century

Brian Q. Cannon and Jessie Embry

Utah State University Press, 2009

The twentieth could easily be Utah’s most interesting, complex century, yet popular ideas of what is history seem mired in the nineteenth. One reason may be the lack of readily available writing on more recent Utah history. This collection of essays shifts historical focus forward to the twentieth, which began and ended with questions of Utah’s fit with the rest of the nation. In between was an extended period of getting acquainted in an uneasy but necessary marriage, which was complicated by the push of economic development and pull of traditional culture, demand for natural resources from a fragile and scenic environment, and questions of who governs and how, who gets a vote, and who controls what is done on and to the contested public lands. Outside trade and a tourist economy increasingly challenged and fed an insular society. Activists left and right declaimed constitutional liberties while Utah’s Native Americans become the last enfranchised in the nation. Proud contributions to national wars contrasted with denial of deep dependence on federal money; the skepticism of provocative writers, with boosters eager for growth; and reflexive patriotism somehow bonded to ingrained distrust of federal government.

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