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This introductory chapter describes how, for roughly a year following the collapse of the old order in November 1989, various groups of actors competed and struggled vigorously to re-create order in a way most advantageous to themselves. The longer-term goal, of course, was to dominate that order in the post-Cold War world. Again and again, key actors in 1989–90 employed the terminology of architecture to describe what they wanted: to start building anew, to construct a European roof or a common European home, to create a new transatlantic architecture, and so on. Leaders consciously proposed a number of competing blueprints for the future and described them as such. This metaphoric understanding, on top of its historical evidence, is an apt one for a study centered on Berlin, where so much real architecture went up after the wall came down.

This chapter discusses the breakdown of the nobilities of Europe during the 18th century. Between 1772 and 1775 Russia was wracked by the greatest popular uprising of the century led by the Cossack Pugachev. In June 1774, serfs along the faraway Volga were massacring lords by the thousands. These incidents triggered an uprising in Bohemia the following year. After the fall of these two outbreaks, Catherine II decided that the Russian nobility must be supported more positively and integrated more firmly unto the fabric of regional government. In addition, the Empress Maria Theresia accelerated measures to limit the exactions of lords, while Joseph II charted at her timidity and dreamed of breaking land lord power totally.

This chapter explores how the Swartzentruber Amish families who began to arrive in New York State in 1974 came because there was affordable land available. Although the availability of cheap farmland was a key factor in their decision to move to New York, many Swartzentruber families, like the Troyer families who moved to the Conewango Valley, were also motivated by the desire to raise their children in a homogeneous community, away from the influence of different, often more progressive Amish groups. The move allowed the Swartzentruber Amish newcomers to distance themselves from the larger Ohio Old Order community and a history of conflict and schism. With large families, the Swartzentruber Amish are among the fastest-growing groups in North America, and the new settlement expanded quickly.

This chapter traces the arrival of four Old Order Amish families from the Path Valley in Pennsylvania to Lowville in Lewis County. More progressive than Swartzentruber and less progressive than Clymer-area Amish, the Amish in Lowville brought to New York's North Country traditions that have their origins in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the oldest Amish settlement in North America. Descendants of the first Amish to make their homes in the New World, the Lowville settlers left Lancaster County to escape conflict with state and local authorities over their children's education. For the first half of the twentieth century, the Amish struggled with local school boards in several states, and these conflicts have historically been one of the major forces driving the Amish to establish new settlements.

This chapter discusses how, despite their common origin in the Anabaptist movement and Jacob Ammann's break with the larger Mennonite movement, today's Amish are ethnically and religiously diverse. The Swiss Amish began to arrive nearly a century after the first German immigrants had reached North America, and although they identified as Amish, the Swiss Amish immigrants differed in many ways from their German Amish counterparts. These new Swiss Amish settlers were more progressive than either earlier Amish immigrants or their newly arriving German counterparts. Moreover, few Swiss Amish leaders attended the nineteenth-century Diener-Versammlungen, which helped to define the Old Order Amish as distinct from more progressive Amish churches. The Swiss churches have acquired a reputation for stubbornness, and their communities have been shaped by internal conflict.

Chanteuse and composer Titiek Puspa (1937-) vocalized the tensions and contradictions of gendered modernity in Indonesia during the socially turbulent 1960s and 1970s. This period of Indonesian history is divided politically by first president Sukarno’s anti-imperialist “Old Order” (Orde Lama, 1950-1965) and second president Suharto’s pro-Western “New Order” (Orde Baru, 1966-1998). Titiek Puspa (hereafter Titiek) cultivated a proximity to state power – to Sukarno, one of Indonesia’s founding fathers, and Suharto, the “Father of Development” (Bapak Pembangunan) – that amplified her voice and enabled it to circulate more widely and freely than other female singers. However, she was not a mouthpiece of these divergent political “orders”; that is, her relatively autonomous voice did not align neatly with either regime. Titiek’s voice and body were contested terrain in both presidential regimes; they patronized and celebrated her, but also wanted to control her. The patriarchal orders used her as a symbol of proper womanhood in her role as wife and mother, but she developed an image as an independent and successful modern woman who supported her husbands and other family members. Titiek Puspa played an important role in each regime’s ideology of modernity, but she also articulated the disjuncture between a woman’s voice and the reigning political order.

This book concludes by analyzing the sad state of Gubbins’ plaque, and how it speaks to a global phenomenon. For we live today unsure of whether to adore, ignore, or expunge the remnants of old orders. Postcolonialism is a world where colonial and imperial remnants—be they institutions, laws, even land allocations—are tainted understandably and irreparably. At the same time, it is a world in which that which is old, authentic, and in some cases tribal is more exalted than ever. Museums hold a particularly fraught position in this equation. Having arisen from a nineteenth-century worldview, museums are often regarded as little more than outmoded Eurocentric impositions. Yet, a central argument of this book is that museums hold the potential to be reanimated if they are envisioned as archives.

The Natchez District, the wealthiest in the Cotton Belt, epitomized the “ascendancy” and domination of the wealthy cotton planter class. This chapter discusses the origins of the old mercantile order, and the nature of the economic system that was altered by the Civil War. From its colonial roots, the Natchez District was built upon the desire for trade and profits, and indeed European mercantilism preceded and fed the rise of cotton agriculture. The destruction of slavery shook the foundations of the old antebellum system of agriculture and trade, and while many basic market forces remained, new realities were emerging that changed the Southern economic landscape forever.

This introductory chapter narrates the story of the bin Laden killing and the efforts to control the news of its aftermath, all of which highlighted the vulnerability and complexity of the system of global information that has evolved since the dawn the Internet age. The bin Laden raid was covered the old-fashioned way by reporters on the ground who provided both firsthand accounts and informed analysis of the event. The chapter explains how at present, the old information order dominated by powerful media corporations has been flipped and transformed by a new system in which technology has enabled individuals and loosely constructed organizations to participate in the process of gathering and distributing global news. It states how the book seeks to describe the system as it exists today, identify the challenges, and outline the strategies needed to meet them.

This introductory chapter discusses American Jews’ encounters with new media during the past century and the implications of these encounters for religious life. Over the course of the twentieth century—starting with the arrival of sound recordings and silent movies during the first decade of the century and continuing to the advent of the Internet, digital media, and their various devices—a succession of new media became fixtures of daily life for millions of Americans, as well as for many others living in technologically advanced societies. This contingency sparked a discourse among various American religious communities. For instance, Amish and Old Order Mennonites argued over the use of telephone services in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania as either “a divine service” or “the devil’s wires.”