Suchergebnisse

"As war and mass emigration across oceans increased the distances between ordinary people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of them, previously barely literate and unaccustomed to writing, began to communicate on paper. This fascinating account explores this surge of ordinary writing, how people met the new challenges of literacy and the importance of scribal culture to the history of individual experience in modern Europe. Focusing on correspondence and other writing genres produced by French and Italian soldiers in the trenches in the First World War, as well as Spanish emigrants to the Americas, the book reveals how these writings were influenced by dialect and oral speech and were oblivious to the rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation. Through their sometimes moving stories, we gain an insight into the importance to ordinary peasants of family, village and nation at a time of rapid social and cultural change"--

From the middle of the nineteenth century, most European cities experienced a period of unrivalled growth and development that forever changed not only their physical characteristics, but also their social foundations. As the great industrial cites were forced to face the new and unprecedented challenges of rapid urbanisation and increased population, they had to rethink many of the concepts on which previous city institutions had been based. One of the most fundamental of these was the role of house ownership, and the rights and responsibilities it offered. Exploring the social and political meanings attributed to property - specifically home ownership - this study looks at how these changed during the course of the modern city building process between 1860 and 1920. Focussing on two northern European capital cities, Berlin and Stockholm, it provides a symmetrical investigation that helps illuminate the competing factors that shaped the shifting nature of cityscapes and urban social structures.