La Comunità ebraica di Shanghai

The Jewish community in Shanghai was among the first to settle in the Treaty Ports which were opened after the Opium war. Jewish population grew until the rendition of the foreign settlements to the Chinese authorities, and its history broadly consists of three periods.The first Jews came to Shanghai in the XIX century were sephardits from Iraq and India. Among those emigrated to Shanghai following the expansion of the British commerce in China were such famous families as Sassoons, Hardoons and Kadoories.The second wave arrived with the White Russians exodus after the October Revolution; they were askanzits Jews who fled from pogroms and the Russian civil war. The third wave were Jews fleeing from central Europe in the 1930s. This group was the largest of the three.The first settlers saw Shanghai as a port of opportunities, while the others came there seeking refuge.The interwar Shanghai could offer protection and a temporary place of residence for Jewish people. In the 1920s and 1930s Jews coming to Shanghai were helped by local Jewish associations, which supported them in the search for accommodations and jobs. This net of associations was effective until WWII. The war, however, made them face increasing number of contraints. In this constrained situation we should remember that the Japanese authorities, occupying the International Settlement, imposed a ban for new Jewish arrivals to settle in the Hongkou district; while the French authorities under the Vichy government imposed a complete ban on Jewish residents in their concession. Finally, the Jewish immigration to Shanghai had stopped completely in 1942, because there were no more ways to get there.Japanese authorities, however, were not interested in applying the racial laws as their priority lay in the conquest of China. And although the Jews were in an enemy's territory, they were not persecuted. In fact, when the war was over they left Shanghai directly to the United States and Israel.

Rozwój technologiczny samolotów myśliwskich, a ich taktyka w Royal Air Force oraz US Army Air Force na zachodnioeuropejskim tetrze działań operacyjnych podczas II wojny światowej w latach 1939 – 1944

Wydział Historyczny: Instytut Historii

POWKist: visualising cultural heritage linked datasets.

A collaboration between dot.rural at the University of Aberdeen and the iSchool at Northumbria University, POWkist is a pilot-study exploring potential usages of currently available linked datasets within the cultural heritage domain. Many privately-held family history collections (shoebox archives) remain vulnerable unless a sustainable, affordable and accessible model of citizen-archivist digital preservation can be offered. Citizen-historians have used the web as a platform to preserve cultural heritage, however with no accessible or sustainable model these digital footprints have been ad hoc and rarely connected to broader historical research. Similarly, current approaches to connecting material on the web by exploiting linked datasets do not take into account the data characteristics of the cultural heritage domain. Funded by Semantic Media, the POWKist project is investigating how best to capture, curate, connect and present the contents of citizen-historians’ shoebox archives in an accessible and sustainable online collection. Using the Curios platform - an open-source digital archive - we have digitised a collection relating to a prisoner of war during WWII (1939-1945). Following a series of user group workshops, POWkist is now connecting these ‘made digital’ items with the broader web using a semantic technology model and identifying appropriate linked datasets of relevant content such as DBPedia (an archived linked dataset of Wikipedia) and Ordnance Survey Open Data. We are analysing the characteristics of cultural heritage linked datasets, so that these materials are better visualised, contextualised and presented in an attractive and comprehensive user interface. Our paper will consider the issues we have identified, the solutions we are developing and include a demonstration of our work-in-progress.

Pytanie o pamięć. Relacje autobiograficzne więźniów obozów koncentracyjnych

This book consists of two main parts. The first part offers a basic methodological introduction, presenting a concise but multifaceted overview of current problems of collective memory. The second part contains a set of interviews with former prisoners of concentration camps carried out by the authors. The research was conducted by Paweł Greń and Łukasz Posłuszny and focuses on issues of collective and cultural memory illustrated by individual life experiences of concentration camps prisoners. The field of oral history serves as the framework of analysis and narrative inquiry as its research tool. Interviews and additional research materials were collected by the authors and are not available in previous publications, making this work a precious supplement to the current scholarly body of knowledge and achievements in the discipline of memory studies. According to the authors, current historical and literary publications provide an incomplete picture of the WWII and its aftermaths for survivors, because descriptions of the war and imprisonment in the camp play still a dominate role in narratives. The importance of these issues in autobiographies is unquestionable and highly needed to create a common identity among generation of prisoners, though authors often wanted to perceive the fate of individuals in a broader perspective – including the periods before and after the war. Hence, interviews stressed personal experiences and their understanding over time by former prisoners. The interviews covered many topics on life before, during and after the camp – among them daily and neutral routines, but also difficult matters. The latter were connected on the one hand with traumatic events or harsh memories and emotions, and on the other hand with less extensively highlighted threads of prisoners’ lives - such as issues of the body and sexuality – and their dependence on particular representation or narrative. The authors are convinced that the book serves not only as a record of past remembered by eyewitnesses, but it also depicts their accounts in wider contexts and discourses, which expose specific dimensions of told and written stories. In the book Questions for Memory one examine the approach proposed by young scholars. Interviews were conducted from 2009-2011, seventy years after the end of the second world war, and this initiative was the result of questions and doubts of the authors from the existing literature. They also wanted to use the unique opportunity to meet with eyewitnesses and record their stories, because when they pass away we will irretrievably lose the possibility to listen to them and to pose sensitive questions. The majority of the interviewees were prisoners of KL Auschwitz-Birkenau, and their experiences differed greatly from each other based on social background and specific experience in the camps as well as their post-camp and postwar life. Aside from persons whose stories are already well known and open, readers will hear the stories of those who spoke only reluctantly and very rarely, or who had remained silent until the present author’s research. Qualitative differences between interviews occurred on the level of established relationship and atmosphere of trust, which varied according to circumstances and individual character and personality. For P. Greń and Ł. Posłuszny, each interviewed person is equally and highly valued due to the collected material and the personal experience of the meetings. Among the ten interviews placed in the book, seven of them are the stories told by women. Their testimonies exemplify realities of everyday prisoners’ existence and gravitate towards mirroring specifically feminine perspectives of imprisonment. For women, crucial problems stemmed from experiences of body that intertwine with suffering, feeling of shame and humiliation. Early discussions on holocaust literature and issues of representation that shaped the Polish narrative and collective memory imposed imperatives of silence on certain topics. A solution for reconciling heroic and inhuman deeds in stories with completely human physiology was impossible and improper for many years. There were also questions about life after, ways of dealing with a trauma or reflections on the present time. During conversations the authors attempted to come closer to something distant and incomprehensible for their generation and for people who did not experience the camps. Despite the fact that there have been seventy years of dealing with these events in literature, art, drama, film, memoirs and scientific works, the past still breeds more questions than answers. The book Questions for Memory serves as an example of this phenomenon.

Espionage against Poland in the Documents and Analyses of the Polish Special Services (1944 - 1989) - as Illustrated by the Intelligence Activities of the USA

The text analyses the intelligence activity against Poland in the period 1944-1989. The paper also contains a case study, i.e. an analysis of the American intelligence service activity held against Poland. While examining the research thesis, the author used the documents and analyses prepared by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In order to best illustrate the point, the author presented a number of cases of persons who spied for the USA, which was possible thanks to the analysis of the training materials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs directed to the officers of the Security Service and the Citizens’ Militia. The text tackles the following issues: (1) to what extent did the character of the socio-political system influence the number of persons convicted for espionage against Poland in the period under examination?, (2) what was the level of interest of the foreign intelligence services in Poland before the year 1990?, (3) is it possible to indicate the specificity of the U.S. intelligence activity against Poland? 1) The analysis of data indicates that the period 1946-1956 witnessed a great number of convictions for espionage, which is often associated with the peculiar political situation in Poland of that time. Up to 1953, the countries of the Eastern bloc had reproduced the Stalin’s system, which only ceased due to the death of Stalin himself. Since then, the communist systems gradually transformed into the system of nomenklatura. Irrespective of these changes, Poland still witnessed a wave of repressions, which resulted from the threats continuously looming over the communist authorities – combating the anti-communist underground movement, fighting with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the Polish government-in-exile, possible revisionism of borders, social discontent related to the socio-political reforms. Hence, a great number of convictions for espionage at that time could be ascribed to purely political sentences. Moreover, equally significant was the fact that the then judicial practice was preoccupied assessing negatively any contacts and relations with foreigners. This excessive number of convictions could ensue from other criminal-law provisions, which applied with respect to the crimes against the State, including espionage. What is also important is the fact that in the Stalin’s period the judiciary personnel acquired their skills and qualifications through intensive courses in law with the predominant spirit of the theory of evidence and law by Andrey Vyshinsky. Additionally, by the decree of 1944 the Penal Code of the Polish Armed Forces was introduced; the code envisaged the increase in the number of offences classified as penalised with death penalty, whereas the high treason was subject to the military jurisdiction (the civilians were prosecuted in military courts till 1955; the espionage, however, still stood under the military jurisdiction). In 1946, there was introduced the Decree on particularly dangerous crimes in the period of the State’s recovery, which was later called a Small Penal Code. 2) The interest that foreign intelligence services expressed in relation to Poland was similar to the one they had in all countries of Eastern and Central Europe. In the case of Poland, it should be noted that foreign intelligence services recruited Polish citizens who had previously stayed abroad and after WWII returned to their home country. The services also gathered information from Poles staying in immigrant camps (e.g. in FRG). The activity of the American intelligence service on the territory of FRG and West Berlin played a key role. The documents of the Ministry of Internal Affairs pointed to the global range of this activity, e.g. through the recruitment of Polish sailors in the ports of the Netherlands, Japan, etc. In line with the development in the 1970s, espionage, which had so far concentrated on the defence and strategic sectors, became focused on science and technology of the People’s Republic of Poland. The acquisition of collaborators in academic circles was much easier, as PRL opened to academic exchange. Due to the system of visas, the process of candidate selection for intelligence services (e.g. the American) began in embassies. In the 1980s, the activity of the foreign intelligence services concentrated on the specific political situation in Poland, i.e. the growing significance of the “Solidarity” social movement. 3) The specificity of the American intelligence activity against Poland was related to the composition of the residency staff, which was the largest in comparison to other Western countries. The wide range of these activities can be proved by the quantitative data of convictions for espionage in the years 1944-1984 (however, one has to bear in mind the factors mentioned earlier in the text, which led to the misinterpretation of these data). Analysing the data and the documents prepared by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, one should treat them with caution, as, frequently, the Polish counter-intelligence service used to classify the ordinary diplomatic practice and any contacts with foreigners as espionage threats. It is clearly visible in the language of the training materials concerned with “secret service methods of the intelligence activity” as well as in the documents on operational activities of the Security Service in relation to foreigners. The level of interest the USA had in Poland was mirrored in the classification of diplomatic posts, according to which Warsaw occupied the second place (the so-called Group “B”) on the three-point scale. The CIA experienced spectacular defeats during their activity in Poland: supporting the Polish underground anti-communist organisation Freedom and Independence and the so-called Munich-Berg episode (both cases took place in the 1950s). The text focuses only on selected issues related to the espionage activities against Poland. Similarly, the analysis of the problem has been based on selected sources, which has limited the research scope - however, it was not the aim of the author to present the espionage activity against Poland in a comprehensive way. In order to assess the real threat posed by the espionage activity, one should analyse the case of persons convicted for espionage in the period 1944-1989, as the available quantitative data, mentioned in the text, cannot constitute an explicit benchmark for the scale of espionage activity. The inaccuracies in the interpretation of data and variables, which can affect the evaluation of this phenomenon, have been pointed out in the text.

Hyperlinks in e-books : expanding the functionality of end-notes

With its powerful search engines and billions of published pages, the Worldwide Web has become the ultimate tool to explore the human experience. But, despite the advent of the digital revolution, e-books, at their core, have remained remarkably similar to their printed siblings. This has resulted in a clear dichotomy between two ways of reading: on one side, the multi-dimensional world of the Web; on the other, the linearity of books and e-books. My investigation of the literature indicates that the focus of attempts to merge these two modes of production, and hence of reading, has been the insertion of interactivity into fiction. As I will show in the Literature Review, a clear thrust of research since the early 1990s, and in my opinion the most significant, has concentrated on presenting the reader with choices that affect the plot. This has resulted in interactive stories in which the structure of the narrative can be altered by the reader of experimental fiction. The interest in this area of research is not surprising, as the interaction of readers with the fabric of the narrative provides a fertile ground for exploring, analysing, and discussing issues of plot consistency and continuity. I found in the literature several papers concerned with the effects of hyperlinking on literature, but none about how hyperlinked material and narrative could be integrated without compromising the narrative flow as designed by the author. It led me to think that the researchers had accepted hypertextuality and the linear organisation of fiction as being antithetical, thereby ignoring the possibility of exploiting the first while preserving the second. All the works I consulted were focussed on exploring the possibilities provided to authors (and readers) by hypertext or how hypertext literature affects literary criticism. This was true in earlier works by Landow and Harpold and remained true in later works by Bolter and Grusin. To quote another example, in his book Hypertext 3.0, Landow states: “Most who have speculated on the relation between hypertextuality and fiction concentrate [...] on the effects it will have on linear narrative”, and “hypertext opens major questions about story and plot by apparently doing away with linear organization” (Landow, 2006, pp. 220, 221). In other words, the authors have added narrative elements to Web pages, effectively placing their stories in a subordinate role. By focussing on “opening up” the plots, the researchers have missed the opportunity to maintain the integrity of their stories and use hyperlinked information to provide interactive access to backstory and factual bases. This would represent a missing link between the traditional way of reading, in which the readers have no influence on the path the author has laid out for them, and interactive narrative, in which the readers choose their way across alternatives, thereby, at least to a certain extent, creating their own path. It would be, to continue the metaphor, as if the readers could follow the main path created by the author while being able to get “sidetracked” into exploring hyperlinked material. In Hypertext 3.0, Landow refers to an “Axial structure [of hypertext] characteristic of electronic books and scholarly books with foot-and endnotes” versus a “Network structure of hypertext” (Landow, 2006, p. 70). My research aims at generalising the axial structure and extending it to fiction without losing the linearity at its core. In creative nonfiction, the introduction of places, scenes, and settings, together with characterisation, brings to life the facts without altering them; while much fiction draws on facts to provide a foundation, or narrative elements, for the work. But how can the reader distinguish between facts and representations? For example, to what extent do dialogues and perceptions present what was actually said and thought? Some authors of creative nonfiction use end-notes to provide comments and citations while minimising disruption the flow of the main text, but they are limited in scope and constrained in space. Each reader should be able to enjoy the narrative as if it were a novel but also to explore the facts at the level of detail s/he needs. For this to be possible, end-notes should provide a Web-like way of exploring in more detail what the author has already researched. My research aims to develop ways of integrating narrative prose and hyperlinked documents into a Hyperbook. Its goal is to create a new writing paradigm in which a story incorporates a gateway to detailed information. While creative nonfiction uses the techniques of fictional writing to provide reportage of actual events and fact-based fiction illuminates the affectual dimensions of what happened (e.g., Kate Grenville’s The Secret River and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall), Hyperbooks go one step further and link narrative prose to the details of the events on which the narrative is based or, more in general, to information the reader might find of interest. My dissertation introduces and utilises Hyperbooks to engage in two parallel types of investigation Build knowledge about Italian WWII POWs held in Australia and present it as part of a novella in Hyperbook format. Develop a new piece of technology capable of extending the writing and reading process.

Online distance education models and research implications

As a form of education, distance education is influenced by educationaltheories and ideologies. Hence, over time its various theoretical modelshave reflected varying emphases on students, both individually and ingroups, on content and process, and on administration and costs, and itsguiding philosophies have ranged from knowledge replication to knowledge creation, and from teacher direction to learner engagement. Its founding purpose was the provision of education to populations who were not able to access available residential education. The reasons were not only based on the individual situation, such as, geographic location, family commitments,work commitments, or cost factors, but also included state issues such as insufficient institutions or a lack of enrolment places, full-time funding, or sufficient staff. These factors have contributed in various ways to the growth of distance education, both historically as when distance education was a major focus in many European countries after WWII, and as a current imperative in many countries where the need and desire for education outstrips the supply through residential institutions, regardless of their fiscal capacities. Education is seen by both individuals and states as essential for the development of a better socio-economic environment, hence, distance education has become the cost-affordable means of provision for millions worldwide.Distance education, then, is framed within larger socio-economic andpolitical contexts. These are not only reflective of societal characteristics like those identified by Keegan (2000): immediacy, globalization, privatization, and industrialization, to which we added professional learning, but also reflective of current social, political, and economic circumstances, such as the sequence of global economic crises this century.Within these contexts then, the provision of distance education seldomarises from the desire of an institution alone; rather there are likely to becomplex national, local, and individual aspirations where distance education is seen as the best solution. The realization of this provision depends on the issues being addressed and the various influences on the particular configuration of design and provision. It may be publicly or privately funded; it may seek to emulate or extend educational provision in residential institutions; its focus may be on increasing access or openness or convenience.Models or designs for distance education, then, have generally arisen from consideration of these instances, in part to provide a framework for researchers and in part to provide a means to reflect on issues that the models themselves have tried to resolve and sometimes inadvertently create.

Spheres of Influence: A Few Reflections on the Concept

In the frame of the Ukrainian crisis the question of spheres of influence has returned to political discourse. This may be an awkward subject, but what if we only deny the existence of such power constellations as spheres of influence? Do spheres of influence exist, or are they relics of history, and mere rhetoric? And if they exist, where can we find them? The hypothesis in this article is that instead of being a tangible reality, spheres of influence are obscure and contested political constructions, which nevertheless can have an impact on political behaviour. To demonstrate this, the article will first introduce a few examples of the current use of the concept. Secondly, a few remarks follow concerning the different IR schools of thought, and conceptual history as a method. Next, the article turns to discussing a few dictionaries and the empirical material for the present inquiry, which consists of recent textbooks, i.e. the current political science curriculum in one particular university, at the University of Tampere, Finland. More empirical cases deal with the division of Africa, the post-WWII situation, and the Hungarian revolution of 1956.