Skip to main content

Home/ History Teachers/ Group items tagged Paris

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Aaron Shaw

Modern History Sourcebook: Percy B. St. John: The French Revolution in 1848 - 6 views

  • The Left were evidently alarmed,
  •  
    "Tuesday, February 22. The journals of the opposition appeared with the notice, in large letters, at the head of their papers, that the banquet was given up, and an appeal to the population of Paris to keep order, formed a very prominent part of the announcement. The Left were evidently alarmed, while ministers were confident and their journals sang a triumphant song of victory"
Eduardo Medeiros

Blog comunistas - Guerrilheiro Carlos Eugênio: Aprendi a sobreviver, não me ... - 0 views

  •  
    Reproduzo mais um trecho do livro Viagem à luta armada. Nesta parte do livro Carlos Eugênio está no seu apartamento no exílio em Paris, deitado numa banheira e entorpecido por drogas, que não curam, lógico, mas ajudam a aliviar a dor das lembranças sombrias: das vidas que se perderam na guerrilha que fracassou, da revolução perdida. Ele se lembra da intenção de fugir para Cuba para escapar do serviço militar e da despedida do pai. Ao ler este trecho fico pensando em quantas pessoas neste breve, louco e já tão distante século XX tiveram que fazer a mesma despedida: soldados vermelhos na Rússia; Partisans na Itália; Espartaquistas na Alemanha; todos tiveram que deixar suas famílias, seus entes queridos. Pois a partir dali suas vidas seriam em prol da revolução e nada mais importava a não ser a luta por uma sociedade melhor.
Aaron Shaw

Popular: Did Marie-Antoinette really say "Let them eat cake"? - 10 views

  • in fact, Marie-Antoinette was a generous patron of charity and other members of the royal family were often embarrassed or irritated by her habit of bursting into tears when she heard of the plight of the suffering poor. There's also a problem with dates. During Louis the Sixteenth's time as king, there was only one case of bread shortages in Paris and that was shortly after his coronation. Marie-Antoinette was eighteen at the time and when she heard about the people's unhappiness at the food situation, she wrote a letter about it back to her mother in Austria, in which she said, "We are more obliged than ever to work for the people's happiness. The King seems to understand this truth; as for myself, I know that in my whole life (even if I live for a hundred years) I shall never forget". Marie-Antoinette's personality therefore seems to have been the exact opposite of someone who would joke about the starving poor.
  • The story of a princess joking "let them eat cake" had actually been told many years before Marie-Antoinette ever arrived in France, as a young princess of fourteen in 1770. Her brother-in-law, the Count of Provence, who hated her, later said that he heard the story as a child, long before his brother ever married Marie-Antoinette. The count claimed that the version he heard was that the woman who made the comment had been his great-great-great grandmother, Maria-Teresa of Spain, who advised peasants to eat pie crust (or brioche) during bread shortages. A French socialite, the Countess of Boigne, said she'd heard that it had been Louis the Sixteenth's bitter aunt, Princess Victoria, and the great philosopher, Rousseau, wrote that he had heard the "let them eat cake" story about an anonymous great princess. Rousseau wrote this story in 1737 - eighteen years before Marie-Antoinette was even born!
    • Aaron Shaw
       
      This is quite interesting. Many of my AP Euro students enjoy thinking it was the queen. This will give them something to "chew" on, and allow for a teachable moment. As another great Philosophe suggested we should accept nothing as truth except our own existance.
  • Others think that because the French Revolution was able to dress itself up as the force that brought freedom and equality to Europe, it had to justify its many acts of violence and terror. Executing Marie-Antoinette at the age of thirty-seven and leaving her two children as shivering, heart-broken orphans in the terrifying Temple prison, suggested that the Revolution was a lot more complicated than its supporters like to claim. However, if Marie-Antoinette is painted as stupid, deluded, out-of-touch, spoiled and selfish, then we're likely to feel a lot less pity when it comes to studying her death. If that was the republicans' intention, then they did a very good job. Two hundred years later and the poor woman is still stuck with a terrible reputation, and a catchphrase, that she certainly doesn't deserve.
  •  
    As a student and teacher of, among other things, propaganda and censorship, I think this is a great example for students to play with in thinking about how 'truth' gets established, politically and historically. In discussing nationalism I often talk about the importance of political myth in establishing identities, and here is a powerful example of a myth that became hegemonic.
spoutnik ogik

The Holocaust by bullets - Shoah Memorial - Paris - 10 views

  •  
    Between 1941 and 1944, almost one and a half million Ukrainian Jews were assassinated when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The immense majority was killed by Einsatzgruppen firing squads (mobile execution units in the East), Waffen SS units, the German police and local collaborators. Only a small minority was assassinated after having been deported to extermination camps. Since 2004, Father Patrick Desbois and the Yahad-In Unum research team regularly travel across the regions of Ukraine, intent on identifying and assessing every site in eastern and western Ukraine in which Jews were exterminated by mobile Nazi units during World War II.The exhibition at the Shoah Memorial, from the 20th of June, 2007 to the 6th of January, 2008, presents their ongoing research. By reconstituting the assassins' procedural methods, it provides one with a better understanding of how the genocide of Eastern European Jews was actually put into practice. It has finally become possible to preserve and respect the victims' burial places
Ed Webb

Modern art was CIA 'weapon' - World, News - The Independent - 6 views

  • The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.
  • in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.
  • The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Initially, more open attempts were made to support the new American art. In 1947 the State Department organised and paid for a touring international exhibition entitled "Advancing American Art", with the aim of rebutting Soviet suggestions that America was a cultural desert. But the show caused outrage at home, prompting Truman to make his Hottentot remark and one bitter congressman to declare: "I am just a dumb American who pays taxes for this kind of trash." The tour had to be cancelled.
  • This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy's hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy. It also prevented the US government from consolidating the shift in cultural supremacy from Paris to New York since the 1930s.
  • If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.
  • Moscow in those days was very vicious in its denunciation of any kind of non-conformity to its own very rigid patterns. And so one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticised that much and that heavy- handedly was worth support one way or another
  • As president of what he called "Mummy's museum", Rockefeller was one of the biggest backers of Abstract Expressionism (which he called "free enterprise painting"). His museum was contracted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom to organise and curate most of its important art shows. The museum was also linked to the CIA by several other bridges. William Paley, the president of CBS broadcasting and a founding father of the CIA, sat on the members' board of the museum's International Programme. John Hay Whitney, who had served in the agency's wartime predecessor, the OSS, was its chairman. And Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA's International Organisations Division, was executive secretary of the museum in 1949.
  • "It was very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things we wanted to do - send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad. That's one of the reasons it had to be done covertly. It had to be a secret. In order to encourage openness we had to be secret."
  • Would Abstract Expressionism have been the dominant art movement of the post-war years without this patronage? The answer is probably yes. Equally, it would be wrong to suggest that when you look at an Abstract Expressionist painting you are being duped by the CIA. But look where this art ended up: in the marble halls of banks, in airports, in city halls, boardrooms and great galleries. For the Cold Warriors who promoted them, these paintings were a logo, a signature for their culture and system which they wanted to display everywhere that counted. They succeeded.
spoutnik ogik

musée du quai Branly: highlights visits - 2 views

  •  
    "the musée du quai Branly carried out the 3D digitisation of several hundred objects. The 3D flash tour invites you to discover a selection, accompanied by cards and detailed descriptions. "
1 - 8 of 8
Showing 20 items per page