This elegant and theoretically informed book, illustrated with forty-five photographs, explores the cultural significance of six exhibitions or new museum installations, all opening in Paris between mid-1937 and early 1938: the commercially oriented world's fair titled L'Exposition Internationale des Art et Techniques; the historical Musée des Monuments Français; the ethnographic Musée de l'Homme; two massive art retrospectives, one sponsored by the state of France and the other by the municipality of Paris; and L'Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme.James D. Herbert capitalizes on the proximity of these disparate exhibits to show how they competed with and yet also complemented one another in visually rendering the full scope of human accomplishment through time and across the globe. In this task, Herbert argues, they both succeeded and failed in interesting and productive ways. He asserts that the exhibitions projected and, in a sense, created (created precisely through the act of projection) the real world that they ostensibly only represented.In fact, Herbert argues, the exhibitions developed a particular sense of French national identity—one that, in managing to be at the same moment both inwardly focused and beneficently expansive, would present a vivid contrast to the growing German nationalism of the Third Reich. His epilogue takes a final look at these issues from the perspective of Jean Cocteau's 1950 film Orphée. A ground-breaking work in cultural history, Paris 1937, with its insightful examination of objects from a variety of fields, is a pioneering text in the field of visual studies.

This book builds upon critical reevaluations of modernism and British literature of the 1930s with a simultaneous focus on discourses of race, gender, and empire. The essays direct attention to the complications and ambivalence accumulating around the meanings of Englishness. They reject analyses of texts as chronicles of personal psychological development in favor of analyses that assume texts are shaped by their authors' public intellectual involvement. In addition, they offer detailed, specific explorations of ways in which British women in the 1930s narrativize empire and war. Thus they will resonate with significance for readers in the early twenty-first century for whom empire and war, as well as terror and security, are part of the discourse of everyday life. Robin Hackett is an Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. Freda S. Hauser is an independent scholar. Gay Wachman is retired from the State University of New York-Old Westbury.

Since the first world's fair in London in 1851, at the dawn of the era of industrialization, international expositions served as ideal platforms for rival nations to showcase their advancements in design, architecture, science and technology, industry, and politics. Before the outbreak of World War II, countries competing for leadership on the world stage waged a different kind of war—with cultural achievements and propaganda—appealing to their own national strengths and versions of modernity in the struggle for power. World's Fairs on the Eve of War examines five fairs and expositions from across the globe—including three that were staged (Paris, 1937; Dusseldorf, 1937; and New York, 1939-40), and two that were in development before the war began but never executed (Tokyo, 1940; and Rome, 1942). This coauthored work considers representations of science and technology at world's fairs as influential cultural forces and at a critical moment in history, when tensions and ideological divisions between political regimes would soon lead to war.

Effective and impartial public administration is the foundation of state legitimacy. This was understood 4,500 years ago when Urukagina, the ruler of a small country in Mesopotamia, proclaimed the first known reform of public service. The quality of public administration will be even more important in the 21st century. Successful states will be those that recognise public service as a key determinant of national competitive advantage. That realisation will generate a radical change in the image of the civil servant — from dull, uninspired public official to passionate advocate of the common good.This transformation will be the product of the complex challenges arising from the interweaving of globalisation with the '4th Industrial Revolution.' These and related developments are forcing governments around the world to search for public service that can respond to the unprecedented range of opportunities and threats emerging from a rapidly evolving international context. In an increasingly frenetic world ruled by 'Wicked Ostriches' and 'Black Elephants', governments require a civil service capable of achieving five outcomes: i) unlocking the creativity and collaborative spirit needed to solve complex problems; ii) overcoming the fallacy that the private sector is inherently more innovative and efficient than the public service; iii) developing societies that are perceived by their citizens as fair; iv) fostering the trust of citizens in their governments; and v) bolstering the legitimacy of the state.The author, who is Director of the United Nations Development Programme's Global Centre for Public Service Excellence in Singapore, suggests that these interconnected aims will result in a new phenomenon: the public recognition by political leaders and citizens that future prosperity, political stability, environmental sustainability and social cohesion are dependent on committed and creative civil servants passionate about promoting the long-term national interest.'I shall pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.'Mahatma Gandhi

This title was first published in 2002: Since the invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century the production, distribution and consumption of printed matter have been the principal means through which new ideas and representations have been spread. In recent times cultural historians have taken a growing interest in the previously somewhat isolated field of book history, shifting the study of printing and publishing into the centre of historical concern. This study of print and printing culture has naturally led historians to a concern with its urban context. The urban environment was fundamental to the development of printing from the outset, since it was in towns that the necessary combination of technical and entrepreneurial competencies were located, and where a growing demand for printed texts was to be found. Print permeated the urban experience at every level, and formed the chief means by which its ideas, values and beliefs were exported to the rest of society. In this way print promoted the broader urbanisation of society, by spreading urban attitudes and ideas beyond the limits of the city. It is with the urban cultural environment that this volume is primarily concerned, underlining the centrality of printing and publishing to the understanding of urban culture. Focusing particularly on post 1800 France and Germany, it considers a wide range of printed matter and engages with a number of recurrent historical issues, such as the role of printing in urban economies, the construction of metropolitan identities and the testing of moral boundaries.

Paris is the crowning jewel of France, and this literary guide for travellers explores its 20th century history, from 1900-1950. Paris at the turn of the twentieth century had become the cultural capital of the world. Artists and writers came to contribute to flourishing avant-garde movements, as the Left Bank became a new centre of creativity. It drew tourists and travellers, but also many exiled from their home countries or escaping political persecution, and those seeking freedom from social constraints. The romantic myth of Paris persists, but Marie-José Gransard explores the darker side of the City of Lights. She brings her subjects to life by describing where and how they lived, what they wrote and what was written about them, through a wide-ranging literary legacy of diaries, memoirs, letters, poetry, theatre, cinema and fiction. In Twentieth-Century Paris: A Literary Guide for Travellers (1900-1950) both the visitor and the armchair traveller alike will find familiar names, from Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell to Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, and they will encounter unfairly forgotten or neglected writers, and many artists and musicians, famous and less well-known Russians, and writers and thinkers from as far as the Caribbean and Latin America.

In Disturbing Remains, ten extraordinary scholars focus on the remembrance and representation of traumatic historical events in the twentieth century. The volume opens with essays by David William Cohen, Veena Das, and Philip Gourevitch. Their reflections on the narratives framing Robert Ouko's death in Kenya, Sikh-Hindu violence in India around the time of Indira Gandhi's assassination, and the 1994 genocide of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda offer fresh insights into the genesis and aftermath of these tragedies. The next four essays explore the expression of societal disaster in works of art and ritual. Lenin's image, Pablo Picasso's Guernica, balsa figurines of whites made by the Kuna of Panama, and Chinese fertility statuettes after Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward are the subjects taken up by Leah Dickerman, Carlo Ginzburg, Carlo Severi, and Jun Jing. Disturbing Remains closes with three essays about the influence of the dead on the construction of shared identity. István Rév looks at how Hungarians have dealt with the 1956 revolution and its executed leader, and Jörn Rüsen and Saul Friedländer contemplate the public memory of the Holocaust in Germany and worldwide.