Unfinished Utopia

Unfinished Utopia
Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Total Pages : 251
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780801468858
ISBN-13 : 080146885X
Rating : 4/5 (58 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Unfinished Utopia by : Katherine A. Lebow

Download or read book Unfinished Utopia written by Katherine A. Lebow and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-12 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unfinished Utopia is a social and cultural history of Nowa Huta, dubbed Poland's "first socialist city" by Communist propaganda of the 1950s. Work began on the new town, located on the banks of the Vistula River just a few miles from the historic city of Kraków, in 1949. By contrast to its older neighbor, Nowa Huta was intended to model a new kind of socialist modernity and to be peopled with "new men," themselves both the builders and the beneficiaries of this project of socialist construction. Nowa Huta was the largest and politically most significant of the socialist cities built in East Central Europe after World War II; home to the massive Lenin Steelworks, it epitomized the Stalinist program of forced industrialization that opened the cities to rural migrants and sought fundamentally to transform the structures of Polish society.Focusing on Nowa Huta's construction and steel workers, youth brigade volunteers, housewives, activists, and architects, Katherine Lebow explores their various encounters with the ideology and practice of Stalinist mobilization by seeking out their voices in memoirs, oral history interviews, and archival records, juxtaposing these against both the official and unofficial transcripts of Stalinism. Far from the gray and regimented landscape we imagine Stalinism to have been, the fledgling city was a colorful and anarchic place where the formerly disenfranchised (peasants, youth, women) hastened to assert their leading role in "building socialism"—but rarely in ways that authorities had anticipated.

Practicing Utopia

Practicing Utopia
Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Total Pages : 391
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780226346038
ISBN-13 : 022634603X
Rating : 4/5 (38 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Practicing Utopia by : Rosemary Wakeman

Download or read book Practicing Utopia written by Rosemary Wakeman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-04 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rosemary Wakeman provides a sweeping history of "new towns"--those created by fiat rather than out of geographic or economic logic and often intended to break with the tendencies of past development. Heralded throughout the twentieth century as solutions to congestion, environmental threats, architectural malaise, and cultural anomie, today they are often seen as sad, pernicious, or merely suburban. Wakeman shows that hundreds of such towns sprang from templates and designs not only in North America and across Europe but around the world, revealing how different cultures dreamed of (re)organizing themselves. Wakeman also illuminates the missteps and unanticipated results of the initial optimistic choices and impulses.

Gaming Utopia

Gaming Utopia
Author :
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Total Pages : 249
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780253054524
ISBN-13 : 0253054524
Rating : 4/5 (24 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Gaming Utopia by : Claudia Costa Pederson

Download or read book Gaming Utopia written by Claudia Costa Pederson and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media, Claudia Costa Pederson analyzes modernist avant-garde and contemporary video games to challenge the idea that gaming is an exclusively white, heterosexual, male, corporatized leisure activity and reenvisions it as a catalyst for social change. By looking at over fifty projects that together span a century and the world, Pederson explores the capacity for sociopolitical commentary in virtual and digital realms and highlights contributions to the history of gaming by women, queer, and transnational artists. The result is a critical tool for understanding video games as imaginative forms of living that offer alternatives to our current reality. With an interdisciplinary approach, Gaming Utopia emphasizes how game design, creation, and play can become political forms of social protest and examines the ways that games as art open doors to a more just and peaceful world.

The Concept of Utopia

The Concept of Utopia
Author :
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
Total Pages : 248
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0815625138
ISBN-13 : 9780815625131
Rating : 4/5 (38 Downloads)

Book Synopsis The Concept of Utopia by : Ruth Levitas

Download or read book The Concept of Utopia written by Ruth Levitas and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Probes the contested concept of utopia, examining the different ways in which it has been used by commentators and theorists in both liberal and Marxist radiations. The works of Karl Mannheim, Georges Sorel, Ernst Bloch, William Morris, and Herbert Marcuse are studied. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World
Author :
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages : 475
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780393246322
ISBN-13 : 0393246329
Rating : 4/5 (22 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by : Joshua B. Freeman

Download or read book Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World written by Joshua B. Freeman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Freeman’s rich and ambitious Behemoth depicts a world in retreat that still looms large in the national imagination.…More than an economic history, or a chronicle of architectural feats and labor movements." —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times In an accessible and timely work of scholarship, celebrated historian Joshua B. Freeman tells the story of the factory and examines how it has reflected both our dreams and our nightmares of industrialization and social change. He whisks readers from the early textile mills that powered the Industrial Revolution to the factory towns of New England to today’s behemoths making sneakers, toys, and cellphones in China and Vietnam. Behemoth offers a piercing perspective on how factories have shaped our societies and the challenges we face now.

Maps of Utopia

Maps of Utopia
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Total Pages :
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780191640018
ISBN-13 : 0191640018
Rating : 4/5 (18 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Maps of Utopia by : Simon J. James

Download or read book Maps of Utopia written by Simon J. James and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: H. G. Wells is one of the most widely-read writers of the twentieth century, but until now the aesthetics of his work have not been investigated in detail. Maps of Utopia tells the story of Wells's writing career over six decades, during which he produced popular science, educational theory, history, politics, prophecy, and utopia, as well as realist, experimental, and science fiction. This book asks what Wells thought literature was, and what he thought it was for. H. G. Wells formulated a literary aesthetics based on scientific principles, designed to improve the world both in the present and for future generations. Unlike Henry James, with whom he famously argued, Wells was not content simply to let literary art be, for its own sake: he wanted to make art instrumental in improving the lives of its readers, by bringing about the founding the World State that he predicted was man's only alternative to self-destruction. Such a project differed radically from the aims of Wells's late-Victorian and his Modernist contemporaries - with consequences for the nature both of Wells's writing and for his subsequent critical reception. Maps of Utopia begins with the late-Victorian debate about the uses of effect of reading, especially reading fiction, that followed the mass literacy of the 1870-71 Education Acts. It considers Wells's best known scientific romances, such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, and important social novels such as Tono-Bungay. It also examines less well-known texts such as The Sea Lady, Boon and Wells's journalism and political writings. This study closes with his cinematic collaboration The Shape of Things to Come, and The Outline of History, Wells's best-selling book in his own lifetime.

Communism in Eastern Europe

Communism in Eastern Europe
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 251
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781000518337
ISBN-13 : 1000518337
Rating : 4/5 (37 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Communism in Eastern Europe by : Melissa Feinberg

Download or read book Communism in Eastern Europe written by Melissa Feinberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-29 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communism in Eastern Europe is a ground-breaking new survey of the history of Eastern Europe since 1945. It examines how Communist governments came to Eastern Europe, how they changed their societies and the legacies that persisted after their fall. Written from the perspective of the 21st century, this book shows how Eastern Europe’s trajectory since 1989 fits into the longer history of its Communist past. Rather than focusing on high politics, Communism in Eastern Europe concentrates on the politics of daily life, melding political history with social, cultural and gender history. It tells the history of this complicated era through the voices and experiences of ordinary people. By focusing on the complex interactions of everyday life, Communism in Eastern Europe illuminates the world Communism made in Eastern Europe, its politics and culture, values and dreams, successes and failures. This book is an engaging introduction to the history of Communist Eastern Europe for any reader. It is ideal for adoption in a wide array of undergraduate and graduate courses in 20th century European history.