National Endogamy and Double Standards: Sexuality and Nationalism in East-Central Europe During the 19th Century

During the "long nineteenth century," nationalism came to permeate all aspects of European society, including attitudes toward human sexuality. Both sexuality and nationalism are complex phenomena that overlap in myriad ways. However, national endogamy may have been the most characteristically national of all possible sexual attributes: qualities such as chastity or fidelity, while frequently claimed as typical of a given national group, have religious and social dimensions independent of nationalism. An individual who makes nationality a decisive factor in selecting sexual partners, however, not only makes some concept of the nation a defining feature of sexual virtue, but implicitly defines the nation in sexual terms

'Hey Slovaks, Where Is My Home?' Slovak Lyrics for Non-Slovak National Songs

Songs are cultural artifacts which may be 'national' in two distinct ways: they may (1) have been written by a member of the nation in the national language, and as products of a distinct culture thus be ascribed to that culture, or (2) they may have lyrics which consciously glorify a national culture, its myths or its symbols. One would expect songs from the second category to belong to the first as well, but this need not be the case. 'The Star Spangled Banner', for example, has the melody of a British drinking song. Another melody has national lyrics in three different countries. Britain has 'God Save the Queen', the United States has 'My Country 'tis of Thee', Germany has 'Heil dir im Siegeskranz' ('Hail to you in Laurels of Victory'); but all these songs share the same melody. This paper discusses patriotic songs that borrowed not only a melody from outside the national culture, but also lyrics. During the nineteenth-century, Slovak patriots rewrote at least two Czech patriotic songs, and in both cases, the lyrics remained recognizably similar to the Czech originals. Furthermore, these new versions were generally reprinted without accompanying music: readers were assumed to be familiar with the Czech melody. This paper analyzes the texts of these songs as a case study in the role of national songs in nation building, and as a window into the development of Slovak national culture

Contemporary Hungarian Rune-Writing: Ideological Linguistic Nationalism Within a Homogenous Nation

This article analyzes Hungarian rune enthusiasts as a nationalist subculture. It gives a brief explanation of the Hungarian runes as a writing system, explaining different degrees of competency with which the script can be written. Rune-writing enthusiasts typically have a high level of education, and have organized a semischolarly journal, a bookstore, and a dense correspondence network. Interest in the runes is strongly associated with a revisionist cosmology. The ideological nature of this script community shows that nationalism emerges spontaneously, but the limited social basis of the movement suggests that ideology is insufficient for a mass national movement

Budapest and Thessaloniki as Slavic Cities (1800-1914): Urban Infrastructures, National Organizations and Ethnic Territories

Nationalism depends on the spread of urbanization and, as Karl Deutsch noted, improved communication networks. This means that nationalist organizations tended to appear in cities, even cities dominated by another ethnic group. Budapest, a German-Hungarian town, hosted several Slavic national organizations, including the Serbian Tekelianum and the Matica Srpska. Slovaks furthermore tried to found the Pan-Slavic Matica Slovanskqch Narodov v Uhersku. Thessaloniki, a Jewish-Turkish-Greek town, hosted several Slavic Revolutionary organizations, notably IMRO, the Revolutionary Brotherhood and the so-called "Boatmen", an anarchist terrorist organization. This Slavic agitation ultimately derived from educational institutions: the University of Buda and the Exarchate Boys' Gymnasium in Thessaloniki. The non-Slavic urban environment, however, led these early nationalist movements to emphasize inter-ethnic cooperation. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, patriots sought to claim multi-ethnic cities for their own group, but Slavic nationalists in Budapest and Thessaloniki emphasized multiethnic themes which are often-overlooked within Balkan and East-European nationalism

"Such a Smoking Nation As This I Never Saw...": Smoking, Nationalism, and Manliness in Nineteenth-Century Hungary

Tobacco smoking became an important marker of Hungarian national identity during the nineteenth century. This national symbol ultimately had an economic origin: Hungarian tobacco producers resisted the tobacco monopoly of the Habsburg central government, and led an ultimately successful consumer boycott of Austrian products. Tobacco nationalism, however, became a common theme in Hungarian popular culture in its own right, as tobacco use came to symbolize community and fraternity. The use of tobacco was also highly gendered; smoking as a metaphor for membership shows that the Hungarian nation was a gender-exclusive "national brotherhood.

Ban the Bullet-Point! Content-Based PowerPoint for Historians.

Powerpoint arouses many strong feelings, but the debate over the popular program typically pits advocates against detractors: fewer people discuss how PowerPoint should best be used in the classroom. Howard Strauss of Princeton University has observed that "a lot of the stuff that people try to do in smart classrooms is done badly," but University PowerPoint guidelines, with their lists of "dos and don'ts," appear mostly to be the work of IT professionals, not humanities instructors. Drawing on my own experiences lecturing with PowerPoint, I suggest in this article that historians should use the program to display primary sources. They should avoid using PowerPoint as a summary of lecture notes, and abandon bullet points altogether. This advice apparently contradicts conventional wisdom; at least it contradicts the advice given at several major research universities. I will provide some sample lecture slides to justify my approach and end with a brief list of technical hints on designing PowerPoint presentations for history lectures

Why the Slovak Language has Three Dialects: A Case Study in Historical Perceptual Dialectology

Linguists have long been aware that the ubiquitous distinction between "languages" and "dialects" has more to do with political and social forces, typically nationalism, than with objective linguistic distance. This article, an exercise in the history of (linguistic) science, examines political and social factors operating on other levels of linguistic classification than the "language-dialect" dichotomy. Nationalism and linguistic thought are mutually interactive throughout a linguistic classification system: political and social history not only affects a list of "languages," but also a list of "dialects.

Diagnosis and management of hyponatraemia: AGREEing the guidelines

Hyponatraemia is a common electrolyte disorder associated with significant complications and controversies regarding its optimal management. Clinical practice guidelines and consensus statements have attempted to provide clinicians with evidence-based diagnostic and treatment strategies for hyponatraemia. Recently published guidance documents differ in their methods employed to review the quality of available evidence. Nagler et al. used the Appraisal of Guideline for Research and Evaluation (AGREE II) instrument in a systematic review of guidelines and consensus statements for the diagnosis and management of hyponatraemia. Nagler and colleagues highlighted the variability in methodological rigour applied to guideline development and inconsistencies between publications in relation to management of hyponatraemia (including the recommended rate of correction of a low serum sodium concentration). These differences could cause confusion for practising physicians managing patients with hyponatraemia. Please see related article: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/12/231

Safety education in California elementary schools

Statement of the problem: How does the program of safety education in California elementary schools meet the needs of youth as defined by selected authoritative criteria? A sampling of 112 elementary schools of various grade combinations in thirty-four California counties furnished the basis for a questionnaire study. These schools fell within the average daily attendance range of 165 to 599. In addition to this the questionnaire was sent to twelve large city schools in various parts of the state, but in no case did the attendance figure go over seven hundred. The majority of the schools were in rural or semi-rural areas