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On March 26th, 1923, in a formal ceremony, construction of the Milan–Alpine Lakes autostrada officially began, the preliminary step toward what would become the first European motorway. That Benito Mussolini himself participated in the festivities indicates just how important the project was to Italian Fascism. Driving Modernity recounts the twisting fortunes of the autostrada, which—alongside railways, aviation, and other forms of mobility—Italian authorities hoped would spread an ideology of technological nationalism. It explains how Italy ultimately failed to realize its mammoth infrastructural vision, addressing the political and social conditions that made a coherent plan of development impossible.
During the interwar years, broadcast radio became a popular way for Europeans to consume local, national, and international news. The medium not only began to shape European policy and politics, but also laid the foundation for European unification and global interconnectedness. In Europe On Air, Suzanne Lommers has documented the rich and often underexposed history of broadcast radio through the lens of international European relations. She specifically explores the roles of Radio Moscow, Radio Luxembourg, Vatican Radio, and the International Broadcasting Union as institutions that played an important role in national identities and establishing standards for broadcasting. The radio also offered new opportunities to politicians, who seized upon a vibrant and more direct way to communicate with their constituents. Essential reading for scholars of technology and European history, Europe-On Air reveals broadcast radio to be a technology that revolutionized international relations during the brief respite between the chaos of war in Europe.
Conventional histories portray the development of railway infrastructures as a tool to build empires and nation states. Recent scholarship however, has stressed the importance of a transnational perspective beyond an exclusive focus on the nation state. The new perspective enriches both the history of modern Europe and European integration. Constructing Iron Europe demonstrates how during the interwar years key players saw railroads as instruments for building a transnational European community. Based on new archival research, Anastasiadou not only sheds light on patterns of internationalization of railways, but also explores the co-construction of the national and the European in the case of the Greek railways in the Interbellum period. Foundation for the History of Technology & Amsterdam University Press Technology and European History Series (TEHS)
Europe's critical infrastructure is a key concern to policymakers, NGOs, companies, and citizens today. A 2006 power line failure in northern Germany closed lights in Portugal in a matter of seconds. Several Russian-Ukrainian gas crises shocked politicians, entrepreneurs, and citizens thousands of kilometers away in Germany, France, and Italy. This book argues that present-day infrastructure vulnerabilities resulted from choices of infrastructure builders in the past. It inquires which, and whose, vulnerabilities they perceived, negotiated, prioritized, and inscribed in Europe's critical infrastructure. It does not take 'Europe' for granted, but actively investigates which countries and peoples were historically connected in joint interdependency, and why. In short, this collection unravels the simultaneous historical shaping of infrastructure, common vulnerabilities, and Europe.
The coming of the railways signalled the transformation of European society, allowing the quick and cheap mass transportation of people and goods on a previously unimaginable scale. By the early decades of the twentieth century, however, the domination of rail transport was threatened by increased motorised road transport which would quickly surpass and eclipse the trains, only itself to be challenged in the twenty-first century by a renewal of interest in railways. Yet, as the studies in this volume make clear, to view the relationship between road and rail as a simple competition between two rival forms of transportation, is a mistake. Rail transport did not vanish in the twentieth century...
Europe is a continent whose history has, in one form or another, long been dominated by integration. And yet the European integration process is often treated as synonymous with the evolution of just one particular, and until recently geographically quite limited, Western-centred organisation: the European Union (EU). This trend obscures the multitude of ways European states have acted collectively on both sides of the Iron Curtain – and continue to do so throughout the continent today. With contributors drawn from history and political science, this book explores some of these diverse integration efforts ‘beyond Brussels’. We shine a light on international organisations, trade frameworks, and various political, social, scientific and cultural forms of unity in both Eastern and Western Europe. In so doing, the book seeks to redefine the history of the European integration process not only as a less purely EU-centric phenomenon but as a less strictly Western European one too.
The Global Wireless charts a history of wireless beginning in the 1910s, when it was used as a tool for global communication, and ending as it declined and slowly fell from view. Located at a crossroads of media history and science and technology studies, The Global Wireless recounts how the advent of wireless technologies created a novel socio-technical problem: since radio signals easily and unwittingly crossed national borders, they challenged existing systems and standards of national media infrastructure control. The book further examines the political negotiations around the International Telecommunication Union, the growth of international communication networks, and the expansion of global media companies on the eve of World War I. The Global Wireless demonstrates that long before Wi-Fi and 5G, another wireless technology had already spread around the globe and prompted, in its wake, a radical reconsideration of networked communication and community. The Global Wireless should appeal to a broad range of readers, from specialists in the history of radio, technology, and global politics, to professionals and hobbyists in today's wireless and radio industries.
In this expansive historical synthesis, Richard Butsch integrates social, economic, and political history to offer a comprehensive and cohesive examination of screen media and screen culture globally – from film and television to computers and smart phones – as they have evolved through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing on an enormous trove of research on the USA, Britain, France, Egypt, West Africa, India, China, and other nations, Butsch tells the stories of how media have developed in these nations and what global forces linked them. He assesses the global ebb and flow of media hegemony and the cultural differences in audiences' use of media. Comparisons across time and space reveal two linked developments: the rise and fall of American cultural hegemony, and the consistency among audiences from different countries in the way they incorporate screen entertainments into their own cultures. Screen Culture offers a masterful, integrated global history that invites media scholars to see this landscape in a new light. Deeply engaging, the book is also suitable for students and interested general readers.
Au sommaire de ce numéro : Containement, European oil asymmetry, and American Middle East Policy / Connaître ses ennemis plutôt que ses amis / Another Europe, rather than the other Europe ? / S'appuyer sur les asymétries de structures pour réduire les asymétries de système, ou la Détente française en Roumanie / La CSCE, instrument de la confrontation et outil du développement des asymétries européennes / Parallelism, Asymmetry and Convergence in Cold War Europe