Disenchanted Night

Wolfgang Schivelbusch tells the story of the development of artificial light in the nineteenth century. Not simply a history of a technology, Disenchanted Night reveals the ways that the technology of artificial illumination helped forge modern consciousness. In his strikingly illustrated and lively narrative, Schivelbusch discusses a range of subjects including the political symbolism of streetlamps, the rise of nightlife and the shopwindow, and the importance of the salon in bourgeois culture.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch tells the story of the development of artificial light in the nineteenth century. Not simply a history of a technology, Disenchanted Night reveals the ways that the technology of artificial illumination helped forge modern consciousness. In his strikingly illustrated and lively narrative, Schivelbusch discusses a range of subjects including the political symbolism of streetlamps, the rise of nightlife and the shopwindow, and the importance of the salon in bourgeois culture.

Anke Gleber examines one of the most intriguing and characteristic figures of European urban modernity: the observing city stroller, or flaneur. In an age transformed by industrialism, the flaneur drifted through city streets, inspired and repelled by the surrounding scenes of splendor and squalor. Gleber examines this often elusive figure in the particular contexts of Weimar Germany and the intellectual sphere of Walter Benjamin, with whom the concept of flanerie is often associated. She sketches the European influences that produced the German flaneur and establishes the figure as a pervasive presence in Weimar culture, as well as a profound influence on modern perceptions of public space. The book begins by exploring the theory of literary flanerie and the technological changes--street lighting, public transportation, and the emergence of film--that gave a new status to the activities of seeing and walking in the modern city. Gleber then assesses the place of flanerie in works by Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and other representatives of Weimar literature, arts, and theory. She draws particular attention to the works of Franz Hessel, a Berlin flaneur who argued that flanerie is a "reading" of the city that perceives passersby, streets, and fleeting impressions as the transitory signs of modernity. Gleber also examines connections between flanerie and Weimar film, and discusses female flanerie as a means of asserting female subjectivity in the public realm. The book is a deeply original and searching reassessment of the complex intersections among modernity, vision, and public space.

A fascinating and vivid picture of the perils and promises of nocturnal life in cities in the early modern Middle East.

People often associate postwar Germany with technology and with its products of mass consumption, such as luxury cars. Even pop music, most notably Kraftwerk (literally 'power station') with songs such as Autobahn, Radioactivity or We are the Robots, disseminates the stereotype of a close link between German culture and technology. Technology in Modern German History explores various forms of technology in 200 years of German history and explains how technology has been fundamental to the shaping of modern Germany. The book investigates the role technology played in transforming Germany's culture, society and politics during the 19th and 20th centuries. Key topics covered include the different stages of industrialization, the growth of networked cities, and the triumph of a teleological narrative of technology as progress. Moreover, it provides a critical revision of the history of high technology which reveals how high-tech euphoria determined certain paths in history regardless of whether the respective technology proved to be successful. In its second part, the volume introduces new avenues in scholarship. Karsten Uhl examines neglected areas, such as rural technologies or the often-overlooked importance of everyday technologies: How did consumers or workers use new technologies? How did they appropriate and modify them? Lastly, the book considers the final decades of the 20th century and asks if they provided a significant new quality of technological change: To what degree and effects did computerization transform professional and private life in Germany? In culture and politics, reinforced by the German variety of environmentalism, the idea of progress was challenged, as the once prevailing vision of progress gave way to new apprehensions of uncertainty evident to this day. Technology in Modern German History brings fascinating insight into a much neglected area of German history for students and scholars alike.

When late eighteenth-century New Spanish viceregal administrators installed public lamps in the streets of central Mexico City, they illuminated the bodies of Indigenous, Afro-descended, and plebeian Spanish urbanites. The urban patrolmen, known as guarda faroleros, or “lantern guards,” maintained the streetlamps and attempted to clear the streets of plebeian sexuality, embodiment, and sociability, all while enforcing late colonial racial policies amid frequent violent resistance from the populace. In The Enlightened Patrolman Nicole von Germeten guides readers through Mexico City’s efforts to envision and impose modern values as viewed through the lens of early law enforcement, an accelerated process of racialization of urban populations, and burgeoning ideas of modern masculinity. Germeten unfolds a tale of the losing struggle for elite control of the city streets. As surveillance increased and the populace resisted violently, a pause in the march toward modernity ensued. The Enlightened Patrolman presents an innovative study on the history of this very early law enforcement corps, providing new insight into the history of masculinity and race in Mexico, as well as the eighteenth-century origins of policing in the Americas.

Wartime British writers took to the airwaves to reshape the nation and the Empire

This volume brings together eleven case studies that address how the night became visible in the long and global eighteenth century through different mediums and in different geographical contexts. Situated on the eve of the introduction of artificial lighting, the long eighteenth century has much to say about night’s darkness and brilliance. The eighteenth century has been bound up epistemologically with images of light, reason, and order. Night and day, light and darkness, reason and mystery, however, are not necessarily at odds in the eighteenth century. In their analysis of narratives, poetry, urban spaces, music, the visual arts, and geological phenomena, the essays provide various frameworks to examine the representation, treatment, and meaning of the enlightened night. The transnational and multidisciplinary nature of the volume presents a survey of the research currently being done in the field of the long eighteenth-century night. This collection contributes to an ongoing exercise that questions the accepted definitions of the Enlightenment, and by bringing Eighteenth-Century Studies into dialogue with Night Studies, it enriches the critical conversation between these lines of research.