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Lädt ... The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power655 | 28 | 35,229 |
(3.96) | 30 | "An exuberant work of popular history: the story of how streets got their names and houses their numbers, and why something as seemingly mundane as an address can save lives or enforce power. When most people think about street addresses, if they think of them at all, it is in their capacity to ensure that the postman can deliver mail or a traveler won't get lost. But street addresses were not invented to help you find your way; they were created to find you. Addresses arose out of a grand Enlightenment project to name and number the streets, but they are also a way for people to be identified and tracked by those in power. As Deirdre Mask explains, the practice of numbering houses was popularized in eighteenth-century Vienna by Maria Theresa, leader of the Hapsburg Empire, to tax her subjects and draft them into her military. In many parts of the world, your address can reveal your race and class, causing them to be a shorthand for snobbery or discrimination. In this wide-ranging and remarkable book, Mask looks at the fate of streets named after Martin Luther King, Jr., the wayfinding means of ancient Romans, how Nazis haunt the streets of modern Germany, and why numbered streets dominate in America but not in Europe. The flipside of having an address is not having one, and we see what that means for millions of people today, including those who live in the slums of Kolkata, on the streets of London, or in post-earthquake Haiti. Filled with fascinating people and histories, The Address Book illuminates the complex and sometimes hidden stories behind street names and their power to name,to hide, to decide who counts, who doesn't-and why"--… (mehr) |
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Gebräuchlichster Titel |
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Ursprüngliches Erscheinungsdatum |
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Figuren/Charaktere |
Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. | |
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Wichtige Schauplätze |
Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. | |
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Wichtige Ereignisse |
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Zugehörige Filme |
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Epigraph (Motto/Zitat) |
Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. "In Lübeck, on 20 March (1933), a large number of people were taken into so-called protective custody. Soon after began the renaming of the streets."
--Willy Brandt, Links und frei. Mein Weg 1930-1950 (Left and Free: My Path 1930-1950) | |
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Widmung |
Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. For Paul, as he well knows | |
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Erste Worte |
Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. In some years, more than 40 percent of all laws passed by the New York City Council have been street name changes. -Introduction On a hot, fragrant February morning in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), I took a walk with Subhashis Nath, a social workers, to the Bank of Baroda in Kalighat, one of the city's oldest neighborhoods. -Chapter 1, How Can Street Addresses Transform the Slums? | |
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Zitate |
Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. Addresses, the UPU argues, are one of the cheapest ways to lift people out of poverty, facilitating access to credit, voting rights, and worldwide markets. But this is not just a problem in the developing world. Soon, I learned that parts of the rural United States don’t have street addresses either. The slums seemed to have more serious needs than addresses—sanitation, sources of clean water, healthcare, even roofs to protect them from the monsoon. But the lack of addresses was depriving those living in the slums a chance to get out of them. Without an address, it’s nearly impossible to get a bank account. And without a bank account, you can’t save money, borrow money, or receive a state pension. In the 1980s, the World Bank was zeroing in on one of the driving forces behind poor economic growth in the developing world: insecure land ownership. In other words, there was no centralized database of who owned any given property, which made it difficult to buy or sell land, or use it to get credit. And it’s hard to tax land when you don’t know who owns it. Street addresses boosted democracy, allowing for easier voter registration and mapping of voting districts. They strengthened security, as unaddressed territories make it easy for crime to flourish. (On a less positive note, they also make it easy to find political dissidents.) inclusion is one of the secret weapons of street addresses. Employees at the World Bank soon found that addresses were helping to empower the people who lived there by helping them to feel a part of society. In other words, without an address, you are limited to communicating only with people who know you. And it’s often people who don’t know you who can most help you. Addresses made pinpointing disease possible. Location and disease are inseparable for epidemiologists. House numbers were not invented to help you navigate the city or receive your mail, though they perform these two functions admirably. Instead, they were designed to make you easier to tax, imprison, and police. House numbers exist not to help you find your way, but rather to help the government find you. New York was founded as an outpost of the Dutch West India Company for the sole purpose of making money. Indeed, the Dutch colonists, unlike the English Puritans, rather liked their homeland. The Dutch encouraged immigrants from all over to populate the city precisely because they didn’t want to do it themselves. These early New Yorkers were obsessed with accumulating wealth. In 1750, Gottlieb Mittelberger, a German immigrant, wrote a list of those he found in Pennsylvania: “Lutherans, Reformed, Catholics, Mennonites or Anabaptists, Hernhunter or Moravian Brethren, Pietists, Seventh Day Baptists, Dunkers, Presbyterians, Newborn, Freemasons, Separatists, Freethinkers, Jews, Mohammadeans, Pagans, Negroes and Indians.” But also listed were “many hundred unbaptized souls there that do not even wish to be baptized.” Barthes had been invited to lecture in Japan. His topic was “the structural analysis of narrative.” The lecture was an excuse to get to Tokyo. He was in his fifties, and already famous in France, perhaps the only country in the world where a literary theorist could be famous. He traveled to Japan, as one commentator has explained, “to relieve himself, for awhile at least, of the immense responsibility of being French.” Instead of naming its streets, Tokyo numbers its blocks. Streets are simply the spaces between the blocks. And buildings in Tokyo are, for the most part, numbered not in geographical order, but according to when they were built. Urban neighborhoods in the seventeenth century were broken into rectangular blocks (chō), and those owning property in the block had some responsibility for its governance. The block became the key unit for urban administration and geography, and a group of blocks would often share a name. When Shelton was growing up in Nottingham, his teacher gave him a sheet of lined paper and taught him to write the alphabet. The goal was to write letters neatly along the straight line, Emiko is from Japan; her writing paper looked nothing like the paper both he and I remembered. Japanese has three different kinds of scripts, but the bulk of written Japanese uses kanji, characters borrowed from Chinese. Kanji are logograms—each character represents a word or idea. And kanji are not written on lines. Instead, Emiko told Barrie how in Japan their paper did not have lines but dozens of square boxes. (The paper is called genkō yōshi, and is still used in Japanese schools today.) Each kanji acted independently; each was perfectly understandable on its own, unlike English letters, which make no sense unless they are put together in lines and read from left to right to make words. Westerners fixated on streets—lines—and insisted on naming them. But in Japan, the streets themselves, as one commentator has said, “seem to have too little significance in the Japanese urban scheme of things to warrant the prestige that names confer.” The Japanese, Shelton theorized, focused on area—or blocks. Joseph Goebbels was Hitler’s man tasked with making the Nazi message stick. “The task of a gifted propagandist,” he wrote, “is to take that which many have thought and put it in a way that reaches everyone from the educated to the common man.” A simple message, repeated in the right context, could worm its way into the mind and feast forever. And what message is more simple than a street name? The newly chosen names, replacing the communists on the streets, often seemed deliberately provocative—Karl-Marx-Platz, in Dresden, was renamed Palaisplatz (Palace Square) and Friedrich-Engels-Straße became Koenigstraße (King Street). The joining of East and West Germany was not a merger, as one anthropologist has argued, but a “corporate takeover.” Their inability to translate between the names in their hometown left them “speechless,” Christiane wrote. “We cannot talk about places that we have no common name for. Talking about cities, schools, and streets in East Germany, you have to translate between old, new, and very old.” when the Ku Klux Klan was reborn in the years following 1915, its strongest and most violent branch was in Florida. On the day of the 1920 presidential election, just a few months after Young bought the land for Hollywood, the KKK in Ocoee, Florida, murdered almost 60 African Americans. Ocoee’s surviving black community hid in the marshes, while Julius “July” Perry hung from a telephone pole, next to a sign: “This is what we do to niggers who try to vote.” Floridians lynched at least 161 blacks between 1890 and 1920—a rate three times higher than Alabama, and twice as high as Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana. Florida’s state constitution disenfranchised black people and forbade white teachers from teaching them. A street name is a kind of monument, too; in the South, more than a thousand streets bear the names of Confederate leaders. But it’s not just the South. Streets on an army base in Brooklyn are named after Generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. Ohio, a Union State, has three streets named after Confederate generals; Pennsylvania, another Union State, has two. A district in Alaska, along the Bering Sea in an area that is 95 percent Alaska Native, was until recently named after Wade Hampton, one of the South’s largest slaveholders, a lieutenant of the Confederate cavalry, and later, governor of South Carolina. So it’s not just about the vanquished honoring their heroes. America seemed to want to celebrate the Confederacy even though the Confederates had fought to destroy America itself. During Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War, many Northerners looked down on the former rebels with the expected enmity of former foes, and they were often optimistic about the future of African Americans. But that changed, as historian Nina Silber has written, when, “increasingly, northern whites bowed to the racial pressures of reunion.” Northerners began to “overlook the history of American slavery, and came to view the southern blacks as a strange and foreign population,” while at the same time adopting a tender attitude toward the idea of Southern manliness. We want our lives to be predictable, and predictability requires a “narrative link” between the present and the past that reassures us that everything is as it should be. We salt away our memories, bronze them in parks, and tattoo them on street signs to try to force our future societies to be more like our past ones. So memorializing the past is just another way of wishing about the present. The trouble is that we don’t always share the same memories. For many people, a street named after Martin Luther King can only be a black street. And for them, a black street will always be a bad street. No parks, no boutiques, no evidence to the contrary will ever make them feel any differently. Most new regimes want to rebrand the landscape to cast away the past, to show how radically the world has changed. Mandela took the opposite approach. Keeping the old names was, perhaps, a tactic to make the revolution seem less revolutionary, the peace less fragile. Philosopher Henri Lefebvre has said that “A revolution that does not produce a new space has not realized its full potential.” If Mandela didn’t want to change names because he didn’t want to make it too obvious a revolution had happened—well, in that respect, he might have succeeded too well. In New York, even addresses are for sale. The city allows a developer, for the bargain price of $11,000 (as of 2019), to apply to change the street address to something more attractive. (Cashier’s check or money order only, please.) The city’s self-named vanity address program is an unusually forthright acknowledgment that addresses—rather than just locations—can be sold to the highest bidder. Police and firemen might struggle to find a building with a Fifth Avenue address that is not actually on Fifth Avenue (one problem Manhattan and rural West Virginia share). In Chicago, where a similar program allowed developers to manipulate addresses, thirty-one-year-old Nancy Clay died in an office fire when firefighters didn’t realize that One Illinois Center was actually on the less grandly named East Wacker Drive. In the UK, addresses ending in “Street” fetched less than half of those that ended with “Lane.” “Is it the association of the word street—street urchins and streetwalkers?” Richard Coates, a professor of linguistics, asked in the Guardian. “You don’t get avenue urchins, do you?” Disturbingly, houses on roads named “King” or “Prince” were also worth more than those on “Queen” or “Princess.” By definition, homeless people don’t have homes. But an address is not a home. An address, today, is an identity; it’s a way for society to check that you are not just a person but the person you say you are. Today, we know that while the incidence of mental health and addiction is higher in the homeless population, many more have simply fallen on hard times. (Severe mental illness is also more visible in people who live on the streets, rather than in their cars or on friends’ sofas.) Families with children make up a third of the homeless population. And many people without permanent homes are already working; in no state in America today can anyone afford a two-bedroom apartment on a minimum-wage salary. Digital addresses will make life easier. But I don’t see them making it any richer. | |
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Letzte Worte |
Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. History is probably against me. This isn't the first time we have revolutionized the ways we find each other. But in the eighteenth century, residents protested violently when officials marched through their villages painting numbers on their home with that thick ink made from oil and boiled bones. The people understood the new numbers meant that they could now be found, taxed, policed, and governed, whether they like it or not. They understood that addressing the world is not a neutral act. Do we? (Zum Anzeigen anklicken. Warnung: Enthält möglicherweise Spoiler.) | |
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Originalsprache |
Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. | |
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▾Literaturhinweise Literaturhinweise zu diesem Werk aus externen Quellen. Wikipedia auf EnglischKeine ▾Buchbeschreibungen "An exuberant work of popular history: the story of how streets got their names and houses their numbers, and why something as seemingly mundane as an address can save lives or enforce power. When most people think about street addresses, if they think of them at all, it is in their capacity to ensure that the postman can deliver mail or a traveler won't get lost. But street addresses were not invented to help you find your way; they were created to find you. Addresses arose out of a grand Enlightenment project to name and number the streets, but they are also a way for people to be identified and tracked by those in power. As Deirdre Mask explains, the practice of numbering houses was popularized in eighteenth-century Vienna by Maria Theresa, leader of the Hapsburg Empire, to tax her subjects and draft them into her military. In many parts of the world, your address can reveal your race and class, causing them to be a shorthand for snobbery or discrimination. In this wide-ranging and remarkable book, Mask looks at the fate of streets named after Martin Luther King, Jr., the wayfinding means of ancient Romans, how Nazis haunt the streets of modern Germany, and why numbered streets dominate in America but not in Europe. The flipside of having an address is not having one, and we see what that means for millions of people today, including those who live in the slums of Kolkata, on the streets of London, or in post-earthquake Haiti. Filled with fascinating people and histories, The Address Book illuminates the complex and sometimes hidden stories behind street names and their power to name,to hide, to decide who counts, who doesn't-and why"-- ▾Bibliotheksbeschreibungen Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. ▾Beschreibung von LibraryThing-Mitgliedern
Zusammenfassung in Haiku-Form |
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Aktuelle DiskussionenKeineGoogle Books — Lädt ...
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I would recommend this to anyone who is interested in history, sociology, social justice and development and more. It is a really well researched and interesting book.
I requested that my local library purchase this book and I borrowed it but this is a book I would really like to own. ( )