Journal of Contemporary History

The role of German officers in the Bolivian military was domestically and internationally controversial in the interwar period. The most prominent of these officers, General Hans Kundt, played a major role in Bolivian history and politics. From 1929–30 the later Nazi leader Ernst Röhm was a military adviser in Bolivia. Historians of Bolivia have suggested that Röhm was the major force behind a coup that took place in Bolivia in June 1930. This article demonstrates that there is no credible evidence to support these claims. The claims are based on a misconception of Röhm’s politics and political activities in Germany. Röhm’s lack of political activity in Bolivia is further evidence that he was not the revolutionary figure many historians have suggested.

In addition to successive Hungarian governments’ revisionist agenda and the re-education of the population in a Christian and national spirit, the symbolic takeover of Budapest spaces was another priority of Hungarian nationalist policy during the interwar period. From 1920 nationalist and right wing groups in Hungary demonized the capital and attempted to erase its previous associations with communism, cosmopolitanism, liberalism and unbridled consumerism by re-rooting it in the national soil. In order to achieve this effect they limited the autonomy of the municipality of Budapest, erected new monuments and re-wrote the meaning of old ones as well as periodically organizing the spatial takeover of Budapest by Magyar villagers. From the later 1920s on it was the annual celebration of St Stephen in a two-week long festival which became the fulcrum of nationalist efforts to take over the public spaces of the city. However, economic concerns related to the development of urban tourism limited their effectiveness. This article argues that due to the spread of consumerism and tourism propaganda concerns within the festival, by the 1930s it was rather Budapest that was urbanizing nationalism instead of the right wingers nationalizing the city.

In the 1930s the British government developed a system of air raid precautions as a measure against the aerial warfare which was increasingly becoming a feature of contemporary conflict. The air raid precautions system devised by the British government entailed, amongst other measures, the creation of a range of organizations such as the Auxiliary Fire Service and the Warden’s Service which depended upon the voluntary enrolment of British civilians for their success. This article traces the history of these organizations between 1937 and 1941, examining the discourse of citizenship which was drawn upon in their creation, recruitment campaigns and structure. Drawing on a range of primary sources, including government papers, parliamentary debates, press coverage and Mass Observation surveys, the article argues that the discourse of citizenship which was apparent in air raid precautions was complicated by issues of gender. The article concludes that the articulation of air raid precautions as an example of active citizenship had the potential to compromise the continuity of gendered identities in wartime and that the attempts visible within civil defence planning, representation and organization to preserve these identities should be understood as representing the threat that air raids, and defence against them, posed to the relationship between masculinity and femininity.

Business history has long prospered in its institutional niche while remaining on the outer rim of contemporary history. The recent boom in German business history, though, has shown that the insights gained from economic and business studies add significantly to our knowledge of twentieth century history. Beyond National Socialism, which has attracted the lion’s share of both attention and funding, the analysis of corporate protagonists sheds light on the complex interplay of state–business relations and the institutional continuities of Western economies. Case studies – among which the Flick Concern stands out as a cornerstone of recent research in business history – qualify the broad assumptions of the varieties-of-capitalism debate and suggest that familiar periodizations such as the Short Twentieth Century might need reconsideration.

Both the ‘long civil rights movement’ and resource mobilization schools have proposed a long trajectory of civil rights activism stretching from the 1930s and with legacies in the 1960s and beyond. The visible sit-ins of the 1960s were possible because of resources available in the community which had been cultivated by previous generations of activists. This case study of a direct action movement in Savannah, 1960–4 complicates a long civil rights narrative. Rather this was a protest cycle which relied on a degree of spontaneity and new, charismatic leadership. Moving beyond a discussion of why insurgency arises at certain times, the article explains the techniques used to attract growing numbers of recruits at the height of the protest cycle. Finally, the article explains the decline of the movement and the legacy it left in the city. Because the movement leader Hosea Williams was unwilling to share power beyond a small circle, when he left the city in 1964 the cycle quickly deflated and an older generation of activists stepped in to lead civil rights protest. This represented not a legacy but a return to the status quo. The Savannah case study contributes to a wider historiographical debate over the long civil rights movement and its legacies.

The Communist ruling parties of East Central and Eastern Europe in the post-1956 era developed ‘softer’ methods of staying in power, both vis-a-vis the societies they ruled as well as within the Party itself, methods which proved more effective than ‘purges’ and ‘party discipline’. This article investigates these methods, taking the East German ‘Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands’ (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) or SED as a case study and focusing on one specific control procedure in particular: the ‘brigade deployments’ of the Central Committee apparatus of the SED, that is ‘on the job inspections’ of subordinate party organs. A systematic analysis of Central Committee brigade deployments shows that, rather than serving to punish these organs, the inspections were primarily a means of consensus creation in which brigade members effectively used staged performances and a ‘language of intimacy’ to keep their comrades ‘in line’. Though ultimately still a form of repression, this ‘performative’ style of party rule was much more subtle than the common conception of monolithic power machines would suggest.

The article examines the peak and decline in interest in international small arms control during the trans-First World War period. It traces this process from the 1908 Brussels Conference, through the 1919 St-Germain Convention to the 1925 Geneva Convention, with the coda of the 1935 Royal Commission on the Manufacture of and Trade in Armaments. The research identifies the pivotal role of the 1917 Islington Committee. The article argues that realist and idealist small arms controllers have fundamentally different objectives: practical small arms control has tended to be a realist concern, whereas small arms campaigns are, for idealists, a lever to achieve wider goals. The history of small arms control provides a point of entry into understanding the cycles of international politics. The renaissance of interest in small arms control, the article suggests, is the mirror image of the decline in emphasis during the twentieth century.

This article responds to some of the limitations of the historiography of consumption in contemporary Europe, notably its tendency to divorce consumer culture from production and to subscribe, in some cases at least, to a rather schematic model of ‘consumer society’. Focusing on the Moulinex domestic appliance company which developed in Normandy from the late 1950s, it explores the interpenetration of cultures of production at several levels. It considers the role of Moulinex in making domestic appliances available to the mass market, the place of productivism in the Moulinex brand and the place of appliance consumption in company culture, before reflecting on the workers’ perspective on this culture and the meanings they ascribed to the appliances they acquired through the company.

Government files and the system that preceded their introduction have been eclipsed by the introduction of electronic record keeping systems. This has been accompanied both by a marked deterioration in record keeping practices and the use of record keeping to enable an audit culture. The article explores what those charged with integrating digital records into the archives might learn from record keeping practice in the paper world. By explaining how registry systems functioned and developed, it argues that many of the problems and proposed solutions that information technologists believe to be novel have long antecedents. It concludes by suggesting that the voice of the historian needs to be heard more clearly in the debate about the role the archives play in contemporary democratic societies.