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.

This book investigates the financial aspects of crusading in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Taking the kingdom of England as a case study, it explores a variety of themes, such as how much crusades cost, how they were financed, how funds were transferred to the East and how crusaders fared financially after their return. Its fundamental argument, in contrast with current historiography, is that it was the "private" fundraising of individuals - not the "public" fundraising of the Crown and the Church - that constituted the life-blood of the crusade movement in the period under consideration. Indeed, it is likely that the crusades were only able to remain central to the religious and political life of England, and indeed western Christendom, because participants, and those in their connection, continued to be willing to sacrifice their own financial wellbeing for the interests of the Holy Land.

Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern World explores the links between trade, empire, exploration, and global information transfer during the early modern period. By charting how the leaders, members,
employees, and supporters of different trading companies gathered, processed, employed, protected, and divulged intelligence about foreign lands, peoples, and markets, this book throws new light on the internal uses of information by corporate actors and the ways they engaged with, relied on, and supplied various external publics. This ranged from using secret knowledge to beat competitors, to shaping debates about empire, and to forcing Europeans to reassess their understandings of specific environments due to contacts with non-European peoples. Reframing our understanding of trading companies through the lens of travel literature, this volume brings together thirteen experts in the field to facilitate a new understanding of how European corporations and empires were shaped by global webs of
information exchange

The New Sociology of Ageing explores the challenges and opportunities of ageing as a global force. Alongside globalisation, urbanisation, new technology, climate change, and global pandemics, ageing is transforming life in the twenty-first century.

Through the eyes of a young sociology student and her multigenerational family, this book sets out a new sociological framework to interpret ageing societies. It explores how the 'New Old' - the baby boomer generation - might be mobilised as an agency of social change in transforming later life. It proposes this generation as the co-architects of a new intergenerational social contract for the era ahead, rather than as the recipients of a post-war twentieth-century social contract that society can no longer support. Taking Britain as a case study and societies across the world as examples, Slattery explores emerging revolutions in work and retirement, potential crises in pensions, healthcare and housing, as well as transformations in family life and in our attitudes to sex and death in later life.

This book provides a clear overview of the sociology of ageing. It introduces students to demography as a sociological force of the future, and to the perils and the promises of longevity as societies across the world approach the Hundred-Year Life. This book will be of interest to undergraduate students and early scholars in the social sciences, particularly in sociology, gerontology, social policy, and public health.

With a global commitment to achieve gender equality by 2030, the SDGs present a historic opportunity to place gender as central to human progress across the globe. Gender equality, which requires the empowerment of all women and girls, is an explicit goal, in addition to being a fundamental prerequisite to and facilitator of most other SDGs. This edited collection provides a range of geographical and geospatial insights, from a variety of disciplinary and country-specific perspectives, to better understand gender and sustainable development. In addition to several African countries, Mexico, Japan, Canada, USA, and Cambodia are featured. A range of topical case studies examine women's domestic and care work, including water collection, breastfeeding, food purchasing, and caring for elderly family members. Access to health care services is examined in the case of breast screening and antenatal care. Women's engagement in the labour force is also addressed, with a specific look at the renewable energy sector; structural barriers to employment are discussed across a number of chapters, with clear strategies to break through these barriers. Finally, theoretical insights are proposed in better understanding and engaging in gendered inequalities in health.

This book assesses the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for the European Union (EU), as well as its response in dealing with an overarching, multidimensional crisis with consequences extending beyond public health safety to political, economic, legal, and institutional arenas.

It argues the pandemic represents a symmetric crisis cutting across countries with different social, economic and political characteristics and which yet - despite favouring cooperative solutions at the supranational level - has largely been met with initial responses of a national, even local, nature. So, how well did the EU perform as a crisis manager in the pandemic crisis?

This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and readers of crisis, pandemic and health management, European Union politics and governance.

This open access book provides insight on how to interpret capability in ageing - one's individual ability to perform actions in order to reach goals one has reason to value - from a multidisciplinary approach. With for the first time in history there being more people in the world aged 60 years and over than there are children below the age of 5, the book describes this demographic trends as well as the large global challenges and important societal implications this will have such as a worldwide increase in the number of persons affected with dementia, and in the ratio of retired persons to those still in the labor market. Through contributions from many different research areas, it discussed how capability depends on interactions between the individual (e.g. health, genetics, personality, intellectual capacity), environment (e.g. family, friends, home, work place), and society (e.g. political decisions, ageism, historical period). The final chapter summarizes the differencesand similarities in these contributions. As such this book provides an interesting read for students, teachers and researchers at different levels and from different fields interested in capability and multidisciplinary research.

Historians have long engaged with Roy Porter's call for histories that incorporate patients' voices and experiences. But despite concerted methodological efforts, there has simply not been the degree and breadth of innovation that Porter envisaged. Patients' voices still often remain obscured. This has resulted in part from assumptions about the limitations of archives, many of which are formed of institutional records written from the perspective of health professionals. Patient voices in Britain repositions patient experiences at the centre of healthcare history, using new types of sources and reading familiar sources in new ways. Focusing on military medicine, Poor Law medicine, disability, psychiatry and sexual health, this collection encourages historians to tackle the ethical challenges of using archival material and to think more carefully about how their work might speak to persistent health inequalities and challenges in health-service delivery.

The following two chapters are available open access on a CC-BY-NC-ND license:

1 The non-patient's view - Michael Worboys
www.manchesterhive.com/view/9781526154897/9781526154897.00010.xml

2 Family not to be informed? The ethical use of historical medical documentation - Jessica Meyer and Alexia Moncrieff
www.manchesterhive.com/view/9781526154897/9781526154897.00011.xml

This book discusses the intersections between culture, context, and aging. It adopts a socio-cultural lens and highlights emotional, social, and psychological issues of the older adults in urban India. It is set in multiple sites such as Ahmedabad, Delhi, Kolkata, and Saskatoon to indicate how different cultural practices and contextual factors play an integral role in determining the course of aging. It also focuses on different narratives such as older adults living with adult children, older adults living with spouse, and older adults living alone to demonstrate the intricate process of growing old. Drawing from various sites and living arrangements of older adults, it sheds light on cultural constructions of growing old, ideas of belonging, the inevitability of death, everyday processes of aging, perceptions associated with growing old in India, acceptance of the aging body, and intergenerational ties in later lives. Given its scope, the book is essential reading for students and researchers in the fields of sociology, demography, and social scientists studying aging.

The Biennial Jake Harwood Outstanding Book Award 2024

National Communication Association Communication and Ageing Division, Outstanding Book Award 2023

This essential volume explores the vital role of communication in the aging process and how this varies for different social groups and cultural communities. It reveals how communication can empower people in the process of aging, and that how we communicate about age is critically important to - and is at the heart of - aging successfully.

Giles et al. confront the uncertainty and negativity surrounding "aging" - a process with which we all have to cope - by expertly placing communication at the core of the process. They address the need to avoid negative language, discuss the lifespan as an evolving adventure, and introduce a new theory of successful aging - the communication ecology model of successful aging (CEMSA). They explore the research on key topics including: age stereotypes, age identities, and messages of ageism; the role of culture, gender, ethnicity, and being a member of marginalized groups; the ingredients of intergenerational communication; depiction of aging and youth in the media; and how and why talk about death and dying can be instrumental in promoting control over life's demands.

Communication for Successful Aging is essential reading for graduate students of psychology, human development, gerontology, and communication, scholars in the social sciences, and all of us concerned with this complex academic and highly personal topic.

This volume brings together chapters about aging in many non-Western cultures, from Africa and Asia to South America, from American Indians to Australian and Hawaii Aboriginals. It also includes articles on other issues of aging, such as falling, dementia, and elder abuse.

It was thought that in Africa or Asia, elders were revered and taken care of. This certainly used to be the case. But the Western way has moved into these places, and we now find that elders are often left on their own or in institutions, as younger people have migrated to other cities and even countries. Grandparents often find themselves being parents to their grandchildren, a far cry from the kind of life they believed they would have as they aged. This book will explore all these issues and will be of use to students and researchers in this relatively new field.

Afghanistan is an extremely complex and nuanced country that has been one of the centers of imperial conflict at least for 150 years. From the Czarist Russia's march south in the 19th Century threatening British India, three Anglo-Afghan Wars, the Soviet Invasion and occupation of Afghanistan starting in December 1979 and the resulting anti-Soviet Jihad by the Afghan Mujahideen to Kabul's and their allies' (U.S. and NATO) conflict with the Taliban, Afghanistan has been one of the centers of important international and regional conflicts and events.
Historical Dictionary of Afghanistan, Fifth Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 1,000 cross-referenced entries on important personalities as well as aspects of the country's politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Afghanistan.

This monograph presents an interpretation of Descartes's dualism, which differs from the standard reading called 'classical separatist dualism' claiming that the mind can exist without the body. It argues that, contrary to what it is commonly claimed, Descartes's texts suggest an emergent creationist substance dualism, according to which the mind is a nonphysical substance (created and maintained by God), which cannot begin to think without a well-disposed body. According to this interpretation, God's laws of nature endow each human body with the power to be united to an immaterial soul. While the soul does not directly come from the body, the mind can be said to emerge from the body in the sense that it cannot be created by God independently from the body. The divine creation of a human mind requires a well-disposed body, a physical categorical basis. This kind of emergentism is consistent with creationism and does not necessarily entail that the mind cannot survive the body.

This early modern view has some connections with Hasker's substance emergent dualism (1999). Indeed, Hasker states that the mind is a substance emerging at one time from neurons and that consciousness has causal powers which effects cannot be explained by physical neurons. An emergent unified self-existing entity emerges from the brain on which it acts upon. For its proponents, Hasker's view explains what Descartes's dualism fails to explain, especially why the mind regularly interacts with one and only one body. After questioning the notion of emergence, the author argues that the theory of emergent creationist substance dualism that she attributes to Descartes is a more appropriate alternative because it faces fewer problems than its rivals.

This monograph is valuable for anyone interested in the history of early modern philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mind.