Suchergebnisse

This dissertation focuses on historic changes in public perception of narcotic use and abuse from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. From the 1840s to the outbreak of Civil War, politicians, physicians, the general public, and state and federal government remained largely ambivalent on the topic of drug use. Opium, morphine, and cannabis were legal, widely available in American pharmacies, and touted as essential medicines. Within the Bohemian community, artists and writers experimented with the recreational use of cannabis and their accounts of that style of consumption filled the pages of Harper's, The New Yorker, and a host of other literary-minded publications. By the 1880s, that seemingly permissive environment seemed to suddenly give way to a government increasingly focused on the regulation and prohibition of drugs. This work argues that a late-nineteenth century opiate epidemic radically transformed the country's relationship with drugs and placed cannabis on a historical trajectory that led to its criminalization in the late-1930s. As newspapers blamed the perceived narcotic crisis that emerged in post-bellum America on the medical community, public opinion turned, to a large extent, against doctors and pharmacists. This erosion in public trust in the practice of medicine— a direct byproduct of an American opiate crisis—instigated a transfer of control over the nation's approach to drug management. Once entirely the occupation of a relatively decentralized medical community, crucial choices over the dispensation of narcotics and their general management shifted to the arena of popular politics. This dissertation argues that transference of power aided the formation of a prohibition-minded state that rapidly banned smokable opium, non-medicinal opiates, cocaine, alcohol, heroin, and—eventually—marijuana.

This study examines how notions of national identity were developed and disseminated in Spain through the use of lyric theatre during the period of the Bourbon Restoration. Spanish light opera---zarzuela---was not only a popular manifestation of the intellectual project to create a unified sense of national identity; it also provided a mechanism by which the Spanish people could articulate the changes to that identity caused by the pressures of modernization. Furthermore, by aligning its sense of nationalism with the project of mass political mobilization, zarzuela created the distinction between elite and popular culture in Spain. From the 1850s onwards, zarzuela positioned itself as a nationalist genre of lyric theatre through the use of Spanish folk music in its scores and the use of the Spanish people as the protagonists of its plots. Zarzuela also articulated a sense that Spanish nationalism was a popular project; to this end, the genre contrasted itself with opera, which was characterized as something foreign and elitist. Having established itself as a nationalist and populist genre by the 1890s, zarzuela was than able to portray the changing nature of Spain's national identity due to the country's industrialization and urbanization. The populist nature of the genre led to a sense that Spanish nationalism was built in opposition to the corrupt Restoration government; this linked zarzuela to the regenerationist movement that sought to reform government and society in the early years of the twentieth century. The link with regenerationism, however, increasingly placed zarzuela into the category of elite culture. This meant that by the 1920s, zarzuela had lost its position as a mobilizing and a nationalist force. The study of zarzuela is crucial for understanding not only how the elite-driven project of nationalism was communicated to the people it was meant to nationalize; it also demonstrates how those people were able to critique and otherwise participate in the nationalization project through the simple means of buying tickets. Zarzuela also demonstrates the crucial role that nationalism had in creating modern definitions of popular and elite culture. Even a frivolous form of music can have serious political potential

Heritage tourism is a fast growing niche of cultural tourism worldwide. In Africa, several countries, including South Africa, place great emphasis on the growth of heritage tourism because of its potential for local economic development. Cultural and heritage tourism are being advocated as an important niche within the South African economy. This paper explores the perceptions of cultural heritage tourist guides in South Africa towards heritage tourism, it is argued that the country's National Department of Tourism must improve the poor governance and poor management of South African heritage assets, and enhance the preservation, transformation and segmented marketing of South Africa's cultural assets (at all levels of government) in order to sustain and grow cultural tourism in the future.

Heritage tourism is a fast growing niche of cultural tourism worldwide. In Africa, several countries, including South Africa, place great emphasis on the growth of heritage tourism because of its potential for local economic development. Cultural and heritage tourism are being advocated as an important niche within the South African economy. This paper explores the perceptions of cultural heritage tourist guides in South Africa towards heritage tourism, it is argued that the country's National Department of Tourism must improve the poor governance and poor management of South African heritage assets, and enhance the preservation, transformation and segmented marketing of South Africa's cultural assets (at all levels of government) in order to sustain and grow cultural tourism in the future.

The twentieth-century theologian and public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr frequently employed a formulation confounding to his readers, simultaneously appealing to the loftiest altruism as summed up in his identification of the "law of love" and compelling attention to the grittiest realism as encapsulated in his recognition of a universal struggle for power. This sharp contrast was no careless error on Niebuhr's part, but rather an insistence on describing in the most sharply contrasting tones the paradoxical character of human nature. In his Christian Realist view fear and a consequent desire for power over others to protect oneself are inescapable components of human existence within history. The human need for community and refusal to be satisfied with anything less than devotion to the wellbeing of others unsullied by self-love are nevertheless also implanted in the human heart, which recognizes that reality extends beyond human history. Niebuhr demanded attention to both.

Throughout his writings, Harold Nicolson advocates a distinction between 'policy' (to be subject to democratic control) and 'negotiation' (to remain the province of professional diplomatists), preferring to separate these two quite different activities, rather than lumping them together under the general term 'diplomacy' (an intermingling that he found conceptually muddled and politically impossible to sustain once general public opinion becomes politically mobilized). Nicholas Murray Butler and George Kennan, who may be taken as representing idealist and realist American opinion in the twentieth century, found themselves at one in rejecting Nicolson's distinction. Butler believed that the progressive enlightenment of public opinion, resulting in the attainment of the 'international mind', would improve both the formulation of policy and the conduct of negotiations; Kennan deprecated public opinion, at least in the United States, as irredeemably clumsy and ill-informed, and was convinced that this domestic political force would not be satisfied with directing policy, but would insist on interfering with negotiation as well. Across the board, American opinion seems to be hostile to Nicolson's differentiation. This rejection of Nicolson's view illustrates a more general influence of distinctively American thinking about international relations on American attitudes towards, and expectations of, diplomacy.

"Diplomacy and International Law" published on by Oxford University Press.

This, then, is the challenging task that Ian St. John has set for himself-to take a character who, though he was Victoria's favorite prime minister, seems to embody anything but what are taken to be the Victorian values of sobriety, seriousness, industriousness, and faith in both science and religion, and to explain how it was that this person played a central role in Victorian politics for nearly forty years. For Disraeli, these limiting conditions included a House of Commons that, for much of his political life, contained no stable majority and was, therefore, under the influence of shifting coalitions and persuasive speakers who could carry others with them through their performance in debate; the rapid industrialization and urbanization of his country in the middle years of the nineteenth century; the progress of science and repeated crises in the Church; the heyday of mid-Victorian prosperity followed by prolonged economic decline, particularly in agriculture; and the rise of one empire (the German) and the decline of another (the Ottoman), with all the consequences that those changes in the distribution of international power brought for European and global stability.