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The paper compares the work of two innovative institutions for research on non-elite culture throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England, and the Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für empirische Kulturwissenschaft in Tübingen, Germany. In their objects of study, their approaches, the main protagonists' biographies and in their relationship to the New Left, among other aspects, they overlap considerably, yet they also took some divergent routes. Highlighting studies of mass media, pop phenomena and political-theoretical „problematics”, the paper contributes to an understanding of the different paths the study of (common) culture in Germany and in English-speaking countries has taken since then. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When in the mid-1960s the movement of the New Left emerged in Continental-Europe, a group of antiquarians, booksellers and -distributers as well as archivists, established an informal transnational network. This network turned out to be crucial in providing the material groundworks for the production of a certain type of knowledge--a formation of knowledge of the political left that would enable scientists or political activists to compare the current present with the interwar-past of the 1920s and 1930s. This paper follows one of these agents of knowledge: Theo Pinkus (1909-1991), a socialist Swiss antiquarian, literary agent, publisher and founder of a public library of the working-class movement in Zürich. His company's „Büchersuchdienst" vast catalogues of antiquarian books quickly established themselves as vital tools in restocking war-damaged libraries all over Europe in the 1950s and 1960s and building a potent network of specialized antifascist and working-class archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the German perception of landscapes during the First World War. It approaches the issue by consulting the letters and diaries of ordinary soldiers, alongside other publications such as military newspapers and pictorials. Whereas soldiers often privately emphasized the alienness of landscapes ravaged by war, the image most dominant in the public’s consciousness was one of a heroic landscape. It was already accepted during the war that soldiers were influenced and changed by their surrounding environment. After the war, the notion of heroic landscapes was utilised by the political right and had prevailed by 1930, despite disagreement from the pacifist left. These narratives gained widespread acceptance because they were rooted in well-known wartime language and provided an affirmative way of speaking about soldiers’ experiences of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the case of the serial killer Peter Kürten (1929/1930) the police was not only tracing a murderer, but at the same time concepts and techniques to strengthen its epistemic authority. The result was that the investigators brought the social factor vocation (“Beruf”) into play. First, they declared vocation to be a distinctive feature of the unknown murderer. Second, they characterized Kürten as a “Berufsverbrecher”. The paper analyzes how criminalists and criminologists transferred “Berufswissen” of the early 20th century into the realm of deviance, e.g. the notion of a lifelong connection between a person and his vocation and the concept of Taylorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gramophone companies were attracted to India as a large market since the early twentieth century. This article traces the diffusion of the gramophone and its arrival in India as a recipient society. It shows first how Western entrepreneurs learned selling gramophones and music to Indian consumers. Second, it asks how indigenizing forces worked to adapt the commodity to local imperatives. While imported Western products were generally rejected, the gramophone found acceptance through localized and politicized recordings and its links to the Indian independence movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses divergent interpretations of the symbolic meaning and representation of the city of Zanzibar, Tanzania, as a lieu de mémoire in local, national, regional, and global collective memory. Focusing primarily on the 19th and 20th centuries, the author explores several aspects of the city's history, including its cosmopolitanism, its role as a migration hub, and its past as a center of the Indian Ocean slave trade. He also considers how these aspects were reflected in 20th-century urban planning and in the decision to declare the Stone Town district of the city as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The article presents case studies of the historical and economic development of four family farms in Lower Austria, Austria, primarily in the second half of the 20th century, based on rural sociology research and qualitative oral history interviews conducted in the winter of 2010-2011. Topics discussed include agricultural innovations in dairy, cattle, and grain farming, changes in family relationships, and rural social and economic change.

The article discusses changes in agriculture and rural conditions in Europe, particularly in Austria, since the end of the Second World War. The author examines the notion of farming styles developed by Dutch rural sociologist Jan Douwe van der Ploeg to explain structural change in rural areas. He then reports on an interdisciplinary research project on the social, cultural, and economic history of agricultural change with regard to family farms in Lower Austria, Austria, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1980s.