A Cultural History Of Work In The Modern Age

Winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for Multivolume Reference/Humanities Changes in production and consumption fundamentally transformed the culture of work in the industrial world during the century after World War I. In the aftermath of the war, the drive to create new markets and rationalize work management engaged new strategies of advertising and scientific management, deploying new workforces increasingly tied to consumption rather than production. These changes affected both the culture of the workplace and the home, as the gendered family economy of the modern worker struggled with the vagaries of a changing gendered labour market and the inequalities that accompanied them. This volume draws on illustrative cases to highlight the uneven development of the modern culture of work over the course of the long 20th century. A Cultural History of Work in the Modern Age presents an overview of the period with essays on economies, representations of work, workplaces, work cultures, technology, mobility, society, politics and leisure.

This is the second volume of Friedell's monumental A Cultural History of the Modern Age. A key figure in the flowering of Viennese culture between the two world wars, this three volume work is considered his masterpiece. The centuries covered in this second volume mark the victory of the scientifi c mind: in nature-research, language-research, politics, economics, war, even morality, poetry, and religion. All systems of thought produced in this century, either begin with the scientifi c outlook as their foundation or regard it as their highest and fi nal goal. Friedell claims three main streams pervade the eighteenth century: Enlightenment, Revolution, and Classicism. In ordinary use, by "Enlightenment" we mean an extreme rationalistic tendency of which preliminary stages were noted in the seventeenth century. Th e term "Classicism", is well understood. Under the term "Revolution" Friedell includes all movements directed against what has been dominant and traditional. Th e aims of such movements were remodeling the state and society, banning all esthetic canons, and dethronement of reason by sentiment, all in the name of the "Return to Nature." Th e Enlightenment tendency might be seen as laying the ground for an age of revolution. Th is second volume continues Friedell's dramatic history of the driving forces of the twentieth century.

Winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for Multivolume Reference/Humanities In the early modern age technological innovations were unimportant relative to political and social transformations. The size of the workforce and the number of wage dependent people increased, due in large part to population growth, but also as a result of changes in the organization of work. The diversity of workplaces in many significant economic sectors was on the rise in the 16th-century: family farming, urban crafts and trades, and large enterprises in mining, printing and shipbuilding. Moreover, the increasing influence of global commerce, as accompanied by local and regional specialization, prompted an increased reliance on forms of under-compensated and non-compensated work which were integral to economic growth. Economic volatility swelled the ranks of the mobile poor, who moved along Europe's roads seeking sustenance, and the endemic warfare of the period prompted young men to sign on as soldiers and sailors. Colonists migrated to Europe's territories in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, while others were forced overseas as servants, convicts or slaves. The early modern age proved to be a “renaissance” in the political, social and cultural contexts of work which set the stage for the technological developments to come. A Cultural History of Work in the Early Modern Age presents an overview of the period with essays on economies, representations of work, workplaces, work cultures, technology, mobility, society, politics and leisure.

Winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for Multivolume Reference/Humanities Changes in production and consumption fundamentally transformed the culture of work in the industrial world during the century after World War I. In the aftermath of the war, the drive to create new markets and rationalize work management engaged new strategies of advertising and scientific management, deploying new workforces increasingly tied to consumption rather than production. These changes affected both the culture of the workplace and the home, as the gendered family economy of the modern worker struggled with the vagaries of a changing gendered labour market and the inequalities that accompanied them. This volume draws on illustrative cases to highlight the uneven development of the modern culture of work over the course of the long 20th century. A Cultural History of Work in the Modern Age presents an overview of the period with essays on economies, representations of work, workplaces, work cultures, technology, mobility, society, politics and leisure.

Volume three of A Cultural History of the Modern Age finishes a journey that begins with Descartes in the first volume and ends with Freud and the psychoanalytical movement in the third volume. Friedell describes the contents of these books as a series of performances, starting with the birth of the man of the Modern Age, followed by flowering of this epoch, and concludes with the death of the Modern Age. This huge landscape provides an intertwining of the material and the cultural, the civil and the military, from the high points of creative flowering in Europe to death and emptiness. The themes convey multiple messages: romanticism and liberalism opens the cultural scene, encased in a movement from The Congress of Vienna and its claims of peaceful co-existence to the Franco-German War. The final segment covers the period from Bismarck's generation to World War I. In each instance, the quotidian life of struggle, racial, religious, and social class is seen through the lens of the mighty figures of the period. The works of the period's great figures are shown in the new light of the human search for symbolism, the search for superman, the rise of individualism and decline of history as a source for knowledge. This third volume is painted in dark colors, a foreboding of the world that was to come, of political extremes, and intellectual exaggerations. The author looks forward to a postmodern Europe in which there is a faint glean of light from the other side. What actually appeared was the glare of Nazism and Communism, each claiming the future.

Across the humanities and the social sciences, disciplinary boundaries have come into question as scholars have acknowledged their common preoccupations with cultural phenomena ranging from rituals and ceremonies to texts and discourse. Literary critics, for example, have turned to history for a deepening of their notion of cultural products; some of them now read historical documents in the same way that they previously read "great" texts. Anthropologists have turned to the history of their own discipline in order to better understand the ways in which disciplinary authority was constructed. As historians have begun to participate in this ferment, they have moved away from their earlier focus on social theoretical models of historical development toward concepts taken from cultural anthropology and literary criticism. Much of the most exciting work in history recently has been affiliated with this wide-ranging effort to write history that is essentially a history of culture. The essays presented here provide an introduction to this movement within the discipline of history. The essays in Part One trace the influence of important models for the new cultural history, models ranging from the pathbreaking work of the French cultural critic Michel Foucault and the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz to the imaginative efforts of such contemporary historians as Natalie Davis and E. P. Thompson, as well as the more controversial theories of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra. The essays in Part Two are exemplary of the most challenging and fruitful new work of historians in this genre, with topics as diverse as parades in 19th-century America, 16th-century Spanish texts, English medical writing, and the visual practices implied in Italian Renaissance frescoes. Beneath this diversity, however, it is possible to see the commonalities of the new cultural history as it takes shape. Students, teachers, and general readers interested in the future of history will find these essays stimulating and provocative.