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This chapter examines the processes of rewriting nationhood in educational narratives regarding the Second World War (WWII) in Poland. Using mixed methods, this case study analyzes narrative change in state-approved history textbooks published between 1977 and 2008, thus covering the period of political transition from a communist to a democratic Poland. Although trends in learning theory and international norms suggest that attention to diversity should have increased in textbooks, in Poland these trends have been subsumed by more long-lasting Polish specific cultural tropes. WWII narratives, in particular, emphasize an ethnically homogeneous nation. Throughout the 31-year sample, educating youth about WWII in Poland continues to be focused on reclaiming “Polishness” rather than on espousing global understandings and citizenship.

This study investigates whether cyclical turning points in the U.S. and U.K. stock markets are unevenly distributed over the year, that is, whether they are more likely to occur during certain months of the year. In examining this form of periodic seasonality, a Markov switching‐model is applied to U.S. and U.K. stock market chronologies of monthly peak and trough dates for the periods May 1835 through March 2000 and May 1836 through September 2000, respectively. In order to provide some evidence on robustness with respect to the sample data, results are obtained for the entire sample periods as well as for various sub‐. For both markets, the evidence indicates that while the probability of moving from an expansion to a contraction does not depend on the month of the year, the probability of switching from a contraction is greater for some months. Additionally, the durations of contractions, but not expansions, are dependent on the month of the year in which they begin.

This study examines the durations of US stock market cycle expansions and contractions for the presence of seasonality. Specifically, it is determined whether the distributional characteristics (i.e., location and dispersion) of the durations of market expansions and contractions are dependent on the time of the year the market phase begins or ends. The duration data are obtained from a stock market chronology of monthly peak and trough dates for the period May 1835 through July 1998 and nonparametric rank‐based tests are used to test for the presence of seasonality. In order to provide some evidence on robustness with respect to the sample data, results are obtained for the entire sample period as well as for various sub‐periods. When the data are aggregated on a quarterly basis, the evidence suggests that seasonal structures are present in stock market cycle durations. These seasonals are related primarily to shifts in location over the course of the year and to when a market expansion or contraction begins. However, when the duration data are aggregated on a bi‐annual basis, support for seasonality is much more limited.

is a memoir. The events of World War II (WWII) took place around the world disrupting the daily lives of children. In school students often examine WWII only from the perspective of their own nation and thereby fail to learn and understand how their lives today were impacted by a war that began 70 years ago and continues to impact the world today. This lesson examines a detailed memoir of Annelex, a child in the Dutch East Indies during WWII and in its immediate aftermath. Annelex describes her fears and how her mother and grandmother helped her overcome uncertainties in living to survive and grow.

We explore how the long-run success of cultural products is affected by the identities of the product's originators and early adopters. Using U.S. jazz recordings from 1920 to 1929, we found that songs were more likely to be later covered from 1944 to 2004 if they followed a pattern of having black originators and white early adopters. Moreover, we provide evidence that this pattern is independent of a song's commercial success, resources available to a song's originators, and group-level indicators such as size and experience. We conclude that late adopters (musicians after World War II (WWII)) were attracted to songs that followed a narrative of both “lowbrow” origins and early adoption by those considered “highbrow” with respect to jazz. The findings also support a new means for considering the role of identities as the building blocks of genres, in particular, and categories more generally.

In the post-WWII decades, the United States, with its overwhelmingly large shares of the world GDP and world trade, became the Group of 1 to attend to the needs of the rest of the free world. The United States offered the military protection inclusive of the nuclear umbrella to the noncommunist countries, and provided aid and financial support for the economic reconstruction of the world destroyed by WWII. The US dollar, with its fixed gold value, became the foundation of stability and growth for the free market economies in the world. The United States could not deliver what were demanded of it indefinitely, as emphasized by Professor Kindleberger. Under the historical circumstances, the fixed gold value of the US dollar came to an end on August 17, 1971 (see Chapter 1).

Public acts of self-criticism in Eastern Europe – a genre cultivated and extorted by the communist parties – did not disappear with the end of communism. In the young democracies of the region self-criticism has become an attempt to diagnose society’s ‘backward’ character and to develop ‘self-correction’ scenarios in order to participate in the Western modernising discourse. On the one hand, conservative and right-wing elites suppose that public acts of self-criticism (performed by politicians, artists or scholars) can endow the vetting procedures of the ancien régime with a sense of social catharsis and retroactive justice. On the other hand, liberal and left-wing intellectuals subject themselves to collective self-reckoning, not only with their choices made in the transition period, but also with the memory of WWII, in order to shape a civil society free of anti-Semitism and intolerance. An analysis based on the discourse-historical approach in critical discourse analysis, Reinhart Koselleck’s historical semantics and Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse, and carried out on the text corpus of selected acts of self-criticism in Poland, aims to diagnose the role these acts had in shaping public discourse on the troublesome past.

Economists usually shy away from talking about power. They assume an economy comprised of many small and medium-sized firms, each competing for consumer dollars. This circumvents the problem of economic power. John Kenneth Galbraith, however, refused to ignore power. It stood at the center of his economics, and he saw it as a key reason the US economy thrived in the years following World War II (WWII). This chapter examines Galbraith’s changing views regarding economic power. American Capitalism explains how countervailing power, or power on the other side of the market, solves the problem of economic power. In The New Industrial State, scientists and educated managers within the firm (the technostructure) mitigate the negative consequences of economic power wielded by large firms. The Affluent Society and Economics and the Public Purpose look to the government as the main check on corporate power. It does this through labor legislation or programs such as the New Deal and Fair Deal. This chapter then evaluates the different solutions Galbraith proffered to the problem of economic power. It contends that Galbraith got three things right when analyzing economic power. First, we no longer live in a world of scarcity due to oligopolistic firms. Second, capitalism was different in the post-WWII era because the US economy thrived and gains were shared widely. Third, Galbraith understood that power was unequally distributed – both between the public and private sectors and within the private sector itself. On the other hand, Galbraith was overly optimistic in believing the market economy or the public sector could counter corporate power.