Digital Commons Network^™

Editor’S Note: Want To Help Develop A Textbook On Comparative Civilizations?, Joseph Drew

Comparative Civilizations Review

Is anyone here in the United States or elsewhere teaching a course in the comparative study of civilizations at the undergraduate level these days?

Since I was thinking about organizing the writing of a textbook on the topic, I began recently by considering what the major areas were to be covered in such a book. What, I wondered, have been the significant approaches scholars have taken over the past century or so to address the fluid, debatable, tenuous meanings and shapes of civilizations?

Ethiopia: Ancient Glory, Awaiting Recovery, Tseggai Isaac

Comparative Civilizations Review

The name Ethiopia is associated in the Book of Genesis with the creation of the world, indicating a sacred and ancient heritage. We find Ethiopia mentioned as having relations with the ancient Biblical nations such as Israel, Egypt, Assyria, and Mesopotamia. Ethiopians get uplifting gratification in reading specific scriptural references from the Bible and applying them to the country. These Biblical allusions include discussion of the Queen of Sheba and her son, King Menelik the First, born from her relationship with King Solomon, who was himself the son of King David, the founder from whom came the lineal parentage of …

Russia’S Geopolitical Civilizational Narratives And Strategic Direction In The Contemporary Multipolar World Order, Sharyl Cross, Igor Okunev

Comparative Civilizations Review

This article sets forth the foundations for recent geopolitical civilizational narratives in Russia that are influencing Moscow’s contemporary foreign policy behavior and the future direction of the Russian “civilizational state” in the global multipolar world order. This article is not intended to provide justification for Russia’s foreign policy choices and actions, but rather the purpose is to explain Moscow’s official geopolitical narratives, and thus to provide a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the considerations informing Russia’s foreign policy behavior.

Vladimir Putin has been at the helm of leadership in Russia exerting unparalleled influence as President and Prime Minister since …

Deuce Redemption: Grindhouse Cinema, Moral Panic, And Urban Renewal, Robert Brenner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

If you consult standard histories of the “redevelopment” of 42^nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue, AKA “the Deuce,” you will read that it was filled with nothing but criminals and pornographers, that decent people avoided it at all costs, and the only way the block could be “saved” was by seizing it via eminent domain, evicting all the current tenants, and replacing them with Disney and its fellow entertainment corporations.

The purpose of this thesis is to offer a more nuanced alternative to these standard histories. I will argue that the Deuce was a lower-class, multiracial, queer entertainment …

Woman Naturally Is Ambitious: Sarah Josepha Hale, Gender, And Success In Antebellum America, Jeanne G. Gutierrez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the interplay of ambition and gender in the pages of Godey’s Lady’s Book under the editorship of Sarah Josepha Hale during the antebellum period bracketed by the Panic of 1837 and the start of the Civil War. In it, I argue that contrary to longstanding assumptions about the primacy of ambition during this time, the meaning and value of ambition was hotly contested, frequently by the middle-class, white, native-born women who published in, and were the primary intended readers of, Godey’s Lady’s Book. Against a background of profound political, economic, and social instability, and possessed of …

Mad At The System: The Mental Health Act Uk: Power And Control Of Racialized Women, Maithreyi Rajeshkumar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Whilst experiences of madness are multiple, fluid and multi-dimensional across spiritual and collective dimensions globally, the categorization and regulation of ‘madness’ have direct foundations in European colonial-capitalist-patriarchal frameworks, policies and systems. This work focuses on the institutions and structures of power, turning UK legislation and those who are trying to reform or change it, into objects of study. A particular piece of United Kingdom legislation is the primary case study for this work – the Mental Health Act 1983 which covers the rights, assessment and treatment of people diagnosed with a ‘mental disorder’. Women, who are detained under this Act …

The Enlightenment In Early America, Annette Gordon-Reed

William & Mary Law Review

The founding of the United States of America is often said to have been the product of Enlightenment ideals that emphasized reason, individual liberty, and notions of progress. During this same era, however, racially based slavery, which confounded reason, denied individual liberty to millions, and challenged ideas about progress, existed in all of the colonies of North America.

The third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, embodied this seeming contradiction at the heart of the American founding. The principal author of the American Declaration of Independence enslaved hundreds of people over the course of his long life.

This Article …

Front Matter

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Christopher Dawson And The Challenges Of Interdisciplinary Studies, Joseph T. Stuart

Comparative Civilizations Review

The following interview was conducted by Ms. Bibi Pelic, the Director of Communications for the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations. The recording is available on the ISCSC YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so-hS2SdoZc

How Companies Heal And Maintain Health: A Unique Function Of Corporate Museums In Japan, Aki Kinjo

Comparative Civilizations Review

Capitalism is embedded in our civilization. Despite its faults, weaknesses, and sins, modern civilization cannot prosper without capitalism. Companies are the engine of capitalism. Yet, just like humans, companies make mistakes, sometimes gross. How do companies overcome unforgivable mistakes? This paper argues that corporate museums in Japan play an important role in helping companies heal from their sufferings, recover, and maintain organizational health.

I deploy a cultural approach to management, analyzing corporate museums as a platform for conveying explicit and hidden narratives. A cultural approach to Japanese management helps us understand why Japan has so many corporate museums, well …

How The State Replaces Civilization: The Japanese Exception, Robert Bedeski

Comparative Civilizations Review

By conceptualizing civilization and state as integrated systems consisting of interacting subsystems, their similarities and differences can be analyzed. The central hypothesis is that civilization consists of three material subsystems — economy, government, and knowledge — and one non-material subsystem, transcendence. When the transcendent subsystem is diminished or destroyed by decree or overwhelming rational and scientific evidence, the emergence of the state occurs as in the cases of the Mongol Empire, the Soviet Union, and communist China.

The apparent universality of this observation is countered by an examination of the Japanese civilization and state, where imperial transcendence dominated and reinforced …

The Rise Of China And The Concept Of Civilization: Constructing A Conceptual Apparatus For Cross-Civilizational Comparisons, Liah Greenfeld

Comparative Civilizations Review

The Rise of China and the Concept of Civilization: Constructing a Conceptual Apparatus for Cross-Civilizational Comparisons

The paper examines the deficiencies of the current understanding of “civilization” in the social science literature, among others exemplified by “civilizational analysis,” and proposes a new concept that adds to the conceptual apparatus of sociological theory — a new, fully independent of others, variant of the cultural process. This independence makes distinctions between civilizations as the root cause of socio-cultural diversity.

Combined with the idea of humanity as a culturally constituted reality sui generis, this concept allows the construction of the theoretical scaffolding …

Civilization, Civilizations, Civilizational State: Untangling Civilizational Discontents In International Relations Theory, Vlad Alalykin-Izvekov

Comparative Civilizations Review

Recently, a herd of terminological hybrids have trampled onto the field of International Relations Theory. These include civilizational state, civilization-state, state-civilization, civilizational nation-state, civilizational privilege, and geopolitical civilizational narrative. What do those notions tell us about global tendencies and trends today?

This paper explores the origin, evolution, and meaning of these terms; it also proposes solutions for problems of a nascent, multi-polar, and multi-civilizational world within the framework of an Integralistic Paradigm in IR Theory.

Books Of Interest Spring 2025, Stephen T. Satkiewicz

Comparative Civilizations Review

Books that may be of interest to scholars of the comparative study of civilizations and may add significantly to the body of scholarship in the civilizational field are highlighted in this new regular feature. These books are also available for book reviews in future editions of Comparative Civilizations Review. Any suggestions for books to be added to this list may be emailed to Book Review Editor Stephen T. Satkiewicz: [email protected].

The Germanic Legends Of The Gold Of The Rhine And Their Āryan Sources, Alexander Jacob

Comparative Civilizations Review

Medieval German legends regarding the gold of the Rhine have both a mythological source, as the gold of the Nibelung dwarf Andvari, and a historical Burgundian one, as a hoard possessed by the Burgundian princes. Here we point to more ancient sources of these legends, ones that are to be found in the cosmological myths and rituals of the Āryans.

Civilizational States And Nation States: A Few Preliminary Thoughts, Stephen Satkiewicz

Comparative Civilizations Review

Over the first two decades of the 21st century, the older certainties that shaped how we looked at the world have been shaken to their core. Most conceptions of how the world works were the byproduct of the postwar order that governed during the Cold War (1945-1991) and were expanded in the immediate post-Cold War era of the 1990s and early 2000s.

On The Books In South Carolina: Mining For Jim Crow Laws, Kate F. Boyd, Vandana Srivastava, Lance Dupre, Christopher Frear, Nitin Gupta, Bobby Donaldson

Faculty and Staff Publications

On the Books in South Carolina: Mining for Jim Crow Laws is a collections-as-data and machine learning project by the University of South Carolina Libraries (USC), sub awarded by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for the period of May 2022 - December 2024. Following UNC’s steps from their first year of the grant, the USC project created a text corpus of South Carolina state legislature acts passed in the period from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Movement (1868-1968). The USC team then utilized machine learning techniques to …

Full Issue

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

From Sonvilier To Canada To Illinois: A Remarkable Swiss Emigration Story, Jeanette Bowman Borich

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Author and genealogist Laurence Overmire stated, “History remembers only the celebrated, genealogy remembers them all.”¹ His words resonate as we consider the 1821 Swiss emigration to the Red River Settlement (in today’s Manitoba, Canada) followed by their subsequent emigration to the Galena, Illinois, area. Three recently published books on the history of Galena’s earliest days as a city² make no mention of the Swiss Red River families as early pioneers.³ A fourth book,⁴ Le Canada et les Suisses by E. H. Bovay, also relatively recently written, tells a different story. Genealogical research about one’s ancestors and …

Soirée Suisse 2024, C. Naseer Ahmad

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Soirée Suisse stands out as one of the most unique and highly anticipated events in Washington, D.C. It takes place at a wonderful time of year when the summer heat begins to surrender to the cool breezes of autumn.

Making Waves: Comfort Women Justice Movements Across Generations, Julia A. Jacobellis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 1932 and 1945 an estimated 200,000 women across the globe were coerced into becoming comfort women for the Japanese military. As comfort women they were forced to prostitute themselves to soldiers, and endured physical, psychological and emotional torture. While comfort stations were liberated in 1945 with the end of World War II, the Japanese government has yet to formally apologize for their treatment of comfort women, and has failed to meet the demands of survivors and their families who seek reconciliation and justice. The global leaders of these movements for reconciliation are institutions and organizations in South Korea, China, …

Willie Albert Cone

African American Funeral Programs

Willie_Albert_Cone.pdf - Funeral program for Willie Albert Cone

Mr. Christopher Williams

African American Funeral Programs

No abstract provided.

Catchwater Colonialism: Reshaping Hong Kong’S Hydrology, Infrastructure, Metabolism And Landscape, 1937–1968, Jack Greatrex, Florence Mok

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This article explores the development of hydrological infrastructure in colonial Hong Kong between the late 1930s and the late 1960s. Utilizing archival sources in Hong Kong and London, it shows how this infrastructure fundamentally reshaped Hong Kong’s geography. By way of concrete catchwaters and metal pipes, both ‘green’ and ‘urban’ Hong Kong became counter-intuitively interconnected. This interconnection created both unintended consequences and novel opportunities for colonial governance, driving forward natural conservation, state intervention into rural society and the development of new carceral institutions. Exploring these developments provides pivotal insight into the urban history of Hong Kong, with implications for global …

Building A Global Partnership Through A Shared History, Lisa Lacross, Shawn Dillard, Bri Ard, Kern Jackson

International Journal of Transformative Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

Effective global partnerships in higher education promote intercultural awareness (Delong et al., 2011) and influence future study and work abroad experiences by articulating the value of global learning (Lewin, 2009). Seeking to broaden global engagement opportunities for minoritized students, specifically African Americans, one institution developed a virtual exchange program through a global partnership of stakeholders from Ghana, Togo, Benin, Cape Verde, and the United States. Grounded in a shared history of the 2019 discovery of the last reported ship to bring enslaved West Africans to the United States, students from Mobile, Alabama and Cotonou, Benin participated in virtual discussions that …

Transnational Revolutionaries: Social And Political Forces Of Change In The Modern Era, Julia Baldowski, Annabel Payamps

Chronicles: Journal Of History

No abstract provided.

Information For Authors, Amy R. Gavello, Julia Taylor

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

Editors, Amy R. Gavello, Julia Taylor

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

Constructing Madness In The Era Of Synthesis: Madness In Medieval Western Europe, 12th-15th Centuries, Amy R. Gavello

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

Charlottesville And Confederate Monuments: How The Civil War And Its Aftermath Continue To Affect Race Relations In The United States, Jesse Lozano

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.