Imagining The Nation In Nature

One of the most powerful nationalist ideas in modern Europe is the assertion that there is a link between people and their landscape. Focusing on the heart of German romanticism, the Rhineland, Thomas Lekan examines nature protection activities from Wilhelmine Germany through the end of the Nazi era to illuminate the relationship between environmental reform and the cultural construction of national identity. In the late nineteenth century, anxieties about national character infused ecological concerns about industrialization, spurring landscape preservationists to protect the natural environment. In the Rhineland's scenic rivers, forests, and natural landmarks, they saw Germany as a timeless and organic nation rather than a recently patchworked political construct. Landscape preservation also served conservative social ends during a period of rapid modernization, as outdoor pursuits were promoted to redirect class-conscious factory workers and unruly youth from "crass materialism" to the German homeland. Lekan's examination of Nazi environmental policy challenges recent work on the "green" Nazis by showing that the Third Reich systematically subordinated environmental concerns to war mobilization and racial hygiene. This book is an original contribution not only to studies of national identity in modern Germany but also to the growing field of European environmental history. Table of Contents: Introduction 1. Nature's Homelands: The Origins of Landscape Preservation, 1885-1914 2. The Militarization of Nature and Heimat, 1914-1923 3. The Landscape of Modernity in theWeimar Era 4. From Landscape to Lebensraum: Race and Environment under Nazism 5. Constructing Nature in the Third Reich Conclusion Abbreviations Notes Sources Acknowledgments Index Writing squarely within the idiom of the 'invented tradition' and the 'imagined nation,' Thomas Lekan argues that in the wake of belated unification and at a time of rapid industrialization, the German landscape came to be seen as a touchstone of national identity. He questions the idea that those engaged in landscape preservation were simply 'antimodern,' and he challenges both scholars who have seen a straightforward continuity from pre-1933 preservationist sentiment to Nazism and those who have made exaggerated claims for the Third Reich as the progenitor of modern green politics. This is a welcome contribution to the literature on local and national identity, joining works by Celia Applegate and Alon Confino, and on the environmental history of modern Germany. Both scholarly and original, Imagining the Nation in Nature is an impressive achievement. --David Blackbourn, Harvard University This important and timely book contributes to our understanding of German identity as well as to modern concepts of environmentalism and nature. Lekan's valuable contribution elucidates the modern, technocratic, and therapeutic vision of preservation that linked Weimar and the Third Reich. His analysis of Nazi bio-nature is significant and thought-provoking. --Alon Confino, University of Virginia

Revisiting divisions of labour is a reflection on the making of a modern sociological classic text and its enduring influence on the discipline and beyond. Ray Pahl's 1984 book is distinctive in the sustained impact it has had on how sociologists think about, research and report on the changing nature of work and domestic life. In this timely revisiting of a landmark project, excerpts from the original are interspersed with contributions from leading researchers reflecting on the book and its effects in the ensuing three decades. The book will be of interest to researchers, students and lecturers in sociology and related disciplines.

The first comprehensive analysis of English national identity in the late Middle Ages. During the late Middle Ages, the increasing expansion of administrative, legal, and military systems by a central government, together with the greater involvement of the commons in national life, brought England closer than ever to political nationhood. Examining a diverse array of texts--ranging from Latin and vernacular historiography to Lollard tracts, Ricardian poetry, and chivalric treatises--this volume reveals the variety of forms "England" assumed when it was imagined in the medieval West. These essays disrupt conventional thinking about the relationship between premodernity and modernity, challenge traditional preconceptions regarding the origins of the nation, and complicate theories about the workings of nationalism. Imagining a Medieval English Nation is not only a collection of new readings of major canonical works by leading medievalists, it is among the first book-length analyses on the subject and of critical interest.

What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.

Ernest Renan was one of the leading lights of the Parisian intellectual scene in the second half of the nineteenth century. A philologist, historian, and biblical scholar, he was a prominent voice of French liberalism and secularism. Today most familiar in the English-speaking world for his 1882 lecture “What Is a Nation?” and its definition of a nation as an “everyday plebiscite,” Renan was a major figure in the debates surrounding the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune, and the birth of the Third Republic and had a profound influence on thinkers across the political spectrum who grappled with the problem of authority and social organization in the new world wrought by the forces of modernization. What Is a Nation? and Other Political Writings is the first English-language anthology of Renan’s political thought. Offering a broad selection of Renan’s writings from several periods of his public life, most previously untranslated, it restores Renan to his place as one of France’s major liberal thinkers and gives vital critical context to his views on nationalism. The anthology illuminates the characteristics that distinguished nineteenth-century French liberalism from its English and American counterparts as well as the more controversial parts of Renan’s legacy, including his analysis of colonial expansion, his views on Islam and Judaism, and the role of race in his thought. The volume contains a critical introduction to Renan’s life and work as well as detailed annotations that assist in recovering the wealth and complexity of his thought.

After the accident, I became a strict believer in the Almighty, believing the accident happened for a reason to change the sights I had for a useful life instead of being an architect that I went to school for and now forgotten. I would now have to look into some new direction. I had some writing experience to look at. I was going to Bible study groups once or twice a week, reading and working on what we read about, with some writing to sum up what was taught. In this writing, I started recreational work as to poetry. Some of this work was of thought "given," religious poems that had good themes. The time and place, I don't know what it means. There, a thought given is usually written, Reasoning for life is usually explained; thought for actions is then remained. As one to another time is a fence, actions portrayed some of defense, The mind was one that was given, the thought within is retained from living. A purpose has reason for a maker to see, sometimes your action is reason to be. Other times a purpose is that not in sight, making the choice not being right. Then again, age is a factor for how you choose, more in sight to win or to lose. Reasoning is many times unexplained, but a good thought was unrefrained. A thought in practice becomes a choice made; a mistake made is one to invade. Life is like a gamble then you die. Don't rock any cradle; don't make 'em cry. Live trying to give back to life; don't let it show. Love the beast; don't let it know. Have peace "for life" killing is banned. See the other side; I hear it's grand! Death is the last step we take; I hope you make it for both of our sakes. All of his instructions were given; your part is in the living. Amen. Earth is our onetime school; to learn God's love, obey his rule. All for our gain to love and learn, graduate in death prepared for our turn! Exclaimed with the happiness to see and rejoice, spirit lives have a voice. Heard for eternity, his promise fulfilled, that with action thought prewilled. You lived for a reason instead of gain in pleasing "yourself." The End of Book 1 Seeing The Real Nation Book 2 is further in-depth, More of a mind being prepped, For the soul to be swept Up, for God knows you cared.

Why are national identities imagined in one way rather than in another? The book analyses national imaginations as an on-going reconstruction process in a political and social context in which several imaginations of the nation struggle to impose their conception. Focusing on a fundamental element of any collective identity, namely the «Other», the book looks at the reconstruction of national identities by actors in political debates on immigration in the late 1980s and 1990s, particularly associations and political clubs which were in favour of and against the presence of immigrant minorities in their respective countries. Thus, the book investigates different ways of imagining the same nation in two old European nation-states, namely France and Denmark, which differ with regard to their nation-building processes, their Second World War history, their memory of colonialism and their experience of immigration. It is thus possible to illustrate that existing ideas of the nation and memories of historical events shape the way in which the nation could be re-imagined in the 1980s and 1990s.