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Books > Humanities > History > Australasian & Pacific history
The battle for Guadalcanal that lasted from August 1942 to February 1943 was the first major American counteroffensive against the Japanese in the Pacific. The battle of Savo Island on the night of 9 August 1942, saw the Japanese inflict a sever defeat on the Allied force, driving them away from Guadalcanal and leaving the just-landed marines in a perilously exposed position. This was the start of a series of night battles that culminated in the First and Second battles of Guadalcanal, fought on the nights of 13 and 15 November. One further major naval action followed, the battle of Tassafaronga on 30 November 1942, when the US Navy once again suffered a severe defeat, but this time it was too late to alter the course of the battle as the Japanese evacuated Guadalcanal in early February 1943.This title will detail the contrasting fortunes experienced by both sides over the intense course of naval battles around the island throughout the second half of 1942 that did so much to turn the tide in the Pacific.
" The 1943 invasion of Bougainville, largest and northernmost of the Solomon Islands, and the naval battles during the campaign for the island, contributed heavily to the defeat of the Japanese in the Pacific War. Here Harry Gailey presents the definitive account of the long and bitter fighting that took place on that now all-but-forgotten island. A maze of swamps, rivers, and rugged hills overgrown with jungle, Bougainville afforded the Allies a strategic site for airbases from which to attack the Japanese bastion of Rabaul. By February of 1944 the Japanese air strength at Rabaul had indeed been wiped out and their other forces there had been isolated and rendered ineffective. The early stages of the campaign were unique in the degree of cooperation among Allied forces. The overall commander, American Admiral Halsey, marshaled land, air, and naval contingents representing the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Unlike the other island campaigns in the Pacific, the fighting on Bougainville was a protracted struggle lasting nearly two years. Although the initial plan was simply to seize enough area for three airbases and leave the rest in Japanese hands, the Australian commanders, who took over in November 1944, decided to occupy the entire island. The consequence was a series of hard-fought battles that were still going on when Japan's surrender finally brought them to an end. For the Americans, a notable aspect of the campaign was the first use of black troops. Although most of these troops did well, the poor performance of one black company was greatly exaggerated in reports and in the media, which led to black soldiers in the Pacific theater begin relegated to non-combat roles for the remainder of the war. Gailey brings again to life this long struggle for an island in the far Pacific and the story of the tens of thousands of men who fought and died there.
Throughout the first year of the war in the Pacific during World War II the USAAF was relatively ineffective against ships. Indeed, warships in particular proved to be too elusive for conventional medium-level bombing. High-level attacks wasted bombs, and torpedo attacks required extensive training. But as 1942 closed, the Fifth Air Force developed new weapons and new tactics that were not just effective, they were deadly. A maintenance officer assigned to a B-25 unit found a way to fill the bombardier's position with four 0.50-cal machine guns and strap an additional four 0.50s to the sides of the bomber, firing forward. Additionally, skip-bombing was developed. This called for mast-top height approaches flying the length of the target ship. If the bombs missed the target, they exploded in the water close enough to crush the sides. The technique worked perfectly when paired with "strafe" B-25s. Over the first two months of 1943, squadrons perfected these tactics. Then, in early March, Japan tried to reinforce their garrison in Lae, New Guinea, with a 16-ship convoy - eight transports guarded by eight destroyers. The Fifth Air Force pounced on the convoy in the Bismarck Sea. By March 5 all eight transports and four destroyers had been sunk This volume examines the mechanics of skip-bombing combined with a strafing B-25, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the combatants (B-25 versus destroyer), and revealing the results of the attacks and the reasons why these USAAF tactics were so successful.
The strategic, political, and moral threats posed by the rise of fascist regimes in Germany and Italy were so severe that all the democratic governments faced a myriad of challenges during the 1930s. Australia, as part of the British Empire, was no exception. Christopher Waters here examines Australia's role in Britain's policy of appeasement from the time Hitler came to power in 1933 through to the declaration of war on September 3, 1939. Focusing on five leading figures in the Australian governments of the 1930s, it examines their responses to the rise of Hitler and the growing threat of fascism in Europe. Australian governments accepted the principle that the Empire must speak with one voice on foreign policy and Australian political leaders were therefore intimately involved in the decisions taken by successive governments in London. As such, this book not only describes the Australian role in these events, but also provides new insights into the Chamberlain government's reactions to the developments in Europe. "Australia and Appeasement" provides an important and original study of the making of imperial foreign policy in the inter-war era and will be invaluable reading for researchers of Australian and imperial history and for anyone interested in the origins of World War II.
Why are we speaking English? Replenishing the Earth gives a new
answer to that question, uncovering a "settler revolution" that
took place from the early nineteenth century that led to the
explosive settlement of the American West and its forgotten twin,
the British West, comprising the settler dominions of Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
The physician and ethnographer Edward Shortland (1812-93) first travelled to New Zealand in 1841, a year after the Treaty of Waitangi. He became private secretary to Governor William Hobson, and quickly learned the Maori language. First published in 1851, this book describes Shortland's experiences on the east coast of New Zealand's South Island while conducting a census of the local Maori settlements in 1843. It documents South Island Maori myths, traditions and everyday life, and includes genealogical tables and a short word-list of the local dialect. It also describes a French Company agent at Akaroa reporting the successful introduction of French vines, the Scottish settlement at Dunedin, and the productivity of several whaling stations. Shortland reminds prospective settlers of the importance of understanding the 'ideas and prejudices' of the Maori, whose many qualities including 'natural bravery and love of freedom' guarantee them continuing 'political weight in their own country'.
Davida Malo's Mo'olelo Hawai'i is the single most important description of pre-Christian Hawaiian culture. Malo, born in 1795, twenty-five years before the coming of Christianity to Hawai'i, wrote about everything from traditional cosmology and accounts of ancestral chiefs to religion and government to traditional amusements. The heart of this two-volume work is a new, critically edited text of Malo's original Hawaiian, including the manuscript known as the "Carter copy," handwritten by him and two helpers in the decade before his death in 1853. Volume 1 provides images of the original text, side by side with the new edited text. Volume 2 presents the edited Hawaiian text side by side with a new annotated English translation. Malo's text has been edited at two levels. First, the Hawaiian has been edited through a careful comparison of all the extant manuscripts, attempting to restore Malo's original text, with explanations of the editing choices given in the footnotes. Second, the orthography of the Hawaiian text has been modernized to help today's readers of Hawaiian by adding diacritical marks ('okina and kahako, or glottal stop and macron, respectively) and the punctuation has been revised to signal the end of clauses and sentences. The new English translation attempts to remain faithful to the edited Hawaiian text while avoiding awkwardness in the English. Both volumes contain substantial introductions. The introduction to Volume 1 (in Hawaiian) discusses the manuscripts of Malo's text and their history. The introduction to Volume 2 contains two essays that provide context to help the reader understand Malo's Moolelo Hawaii. "Understanding Malo's Moolelo Hawaii" describes the nature of Malo's work, showing that it is the result of his dual Hawaiian and Western education. "The Writing of the Moolelo Hawaii" discusses how the Carter copy was written and preserved, its relationship to other versions of the text, and Malo's plan for the work as a whole. The introduction is followed by a new biography of Malo by Kanaka Maoli historian Noelani Arista, "Davida Malo, a Hawaiian Life," describing his life as a chiefly counselor and Hawaiian intellectual.
This study provides a cultural history of Australia and nuclear power. The author examines the country's role as a nuclear test site, the aspirations of the nation toward the postwar nuclear club, its deference to the demands of Britain and the United States, and the complex discourses of Australian society surrounding nuclear power.
Between 1850 and 1907, Native Hawaiians sought to develop relationships with other Pacific Islanders, reflecting how they viewed not only themselves as a people but their wider connections to Oceania and the globe. Kealani Cook analyzes the relatively little known experiences of Native Hawaiian missionaries, diplomats, and travelers, shedding valuable light on the rich but understudied accounts of Hawaiians outside of Hawai'i. Native Hawaiian views of other islanders typically corresponded with their particular views and experiences of the Native Hawaiian past. The more positive their outlook, the more likely they were to seek cross-cultural connections. This is an important intervention in the growing field of Pacific and Oceanic history and the study of native peoples of the Americas, where books on indigenous Hawaiians are few and far between. Cook returns the study of Hawai'i to a central place in the history of cultural change in the Pacific.
In an engaging and original contribution to the field of memory studies, Joy Damousi considers the enduring impact of war on family memory in the Greek diaspora. Focusing on Australia's Greek immigrants in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Greek Civil War, the book explores the concept of remembrance within the larger context of migration to show how intergenerational experience of war and trauma transcend both place and nation. Drawing from the most recent research in memory, trauma and transnationalism, Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War deals with the continuities and discontinuities of war stories, assimilation in modern Australia, politics and activism, child migration and memories of mothers and children in war. Damousi sheds new light on aspects of forgotten memory and silence within families and communities, and in particular the ways in which past experience of violence and tragedy is both negotiated and processed.
This book charts the previously untold story of decolonisation in the oceanic world of the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand, presenting it both as an indigenous and an international phenomenon. Tracey Banivanua Mar reveals how the inherent limits of decolonisation were laid bare by the historical peculiarities of colonialism in the region, and demonstrates the way imperial powers conceived of decolonisation as a new form of imperialism. She shows how Indigenous peoples responded to these limits by developing rich intellectual, political and cultural networks transcending colonial and national borders, with localised traditions of protest and dialogue connected to the global ferment of the twentieth century. The individual stories told here shed new light on the forces that shaped twentieth-century global history, and reconfigure the history of decolonisation, presenting it not as an historic event, but as a fragile, contingent and ongoing process continuing well into the postcolonial era.
This book relays the largely untold story of the approximately 1,100 Australian war graves workers whose job it was to locate, identify exhume and rebury the thousands of Australian soldiers who died in Europe during the First World War. It tells the story of the men of the Australian Graves Detachment and the Australian Graves Service who worked in the period 1919 to 1922 to ensure that grieving families in Australia had a physical grave which they could mourn the loss of their loved ones. By presenting biographical vignettes of eight men who undertook this work, the book examines the mechanics of the commemoration of the Great War and extends our understanding of the individual toll this onerous task took on the workers themselves.
During the Second World War, Indigenous people in the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada mobilised en masse to support the war effort, despite withstanding centuries of colonialism. Their roles ranged from ordinary soldiers fighting on distant shores, to soldiers capturing Japanese prisoners on their own territory, to women working in munitions plants on the home front. R. Scott Sheffield and Noah Riseman examine Indigenous experiences of the Second World War across these four settler societies. Informed by theories of settler colonialism, martial race theory and military sociology, they show how Indigenous people and their communities both shaped and were shaped by the Second World War. Particular attention is paid to the policies in place before, during and after the war, highlighting the ways that Indigenous people negotiated their own roles within the war effort at home and abroad.
Why are we speaking English? Replenishing the Earth gives a new
answer to that question, uncovering a 'settler revolution' that
took place from the early nineteenth century that led to the
explosive settlement of the American West and its forgotten twin,
the British West, comprising the settler dominions of Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
Come On Shore and We Will Kill And Eat You All is a sensitive and vibrant portrayal of the cultural collision between Westerners and Maoris, from Abel Tasman's discovery of New Zealand in 1642 to the author's unlikely romance with a Maori man. An intimate account of two centuries of friction and fascination, this intriguing and unpredictable book weaves a path through time and around the world in a rich exploration of the past and the future that it leads to.
This book reveals the business history of the Australian Government Clothing Factory as it introduced innovative changes in the production and design of the Australian Army uniform during the twentieth century. While adopting a Schumpeterian interpretation of the concept of innovation, Anneke van Mosseveld traces the driving forces behind innovation and delivers a comprehensive explanation of the resulting changes in the combat uniform. Using an array of archival sources, this book displays details of extensive collaborations between the factory, the Army and scientists in the development of camouflage patterns and military textiles. It uncovers a system of intellectual property management to protect the designs of the uniform, and delivers new insights into the wider economic influences and industry linkages of the Government owned factory.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 NED KELLY AWARD, DANGER PRIZE AND WAVERLEY LIBRARY NIB True history that is both shocking and too real, this unforgettable tale moves at the pace of a great crime novel. In the early hours of Saturday morning, 17 November 1923, a suitcase was found washed up on the shore of a small beach in the Sydney suburb of Mosman. What it contained - and why - would prove to be explosive. The murdered baby in the suitcase was one of many dead infants who were turning up in the harbour, on trains and elsewhere. These innocent victims were a devastating symptom of the clash between public morality, private passion and unrelenting poverty in a fast-growing metropolis. Police tracked down Sarah Boyd, the mother of the suitcase baby, and the complex story and subsequent murder trial of Sarah and her friend Jean Olliver became a media sensation. Sociologist Tanya Bretherton masterfully tells the engrossing and moving story of the crime that put Sarah and her baby at the centre of a social tragedy that still resonates through the decades. **Includes an extract from Tanya's next fascinating and chilling true crime story, THE SUICIDE BRIDE**
A History of South Australia investigates South Australia's history from before the arrival of the first European maritime explorers to the present day, and examines its distinctive origins as a 'free' settlement. In this compelling and nuanced history, Paul Sendziuk and Robert Foster consider the imprint of people on the land - and vice versa - and offer fresh insights into relations between Indigenous people and the European colonisers. They chart South Australia's economic, political and social development, including the advance and retreat of an interventionist government, the establishment of the state's distinctive socio-political formations, and its relationship to the rest of Australia and the world. The first comprehensive, single-volume history of the state to be published in over fifty years, A History of South Australia is an essential and engaging contribution to our understanding of South Australia's past.
David Hilliard's God's Gentlemen, originally published in 1978, remains the only detached and detailed historical analysis of the work of the Melanesian Mission. Starting with its New Zealand beginnings and its Norfolk Island years (1867-1920), the work follows the Mission's shift of headquarters to the Solomon Islands and on until the beginning of the Second World War. The Mission, which grew out of the personal vision of the first Church of England Bishop of New Zealand, George Selwyn, formally defined its field of work as 'the Islands of Melanesia' although its activities were confined almost entirely to the island groups that now make up Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. The Diocese of Melanesia was a fully constituent diocese of the Anglican Church of New Zealand from its formation in 1861 until the creation of the autonomous Church of the Province of Melanesia in 1975. Based on a wide range of sources, God's Gentleman is the inner history of the slow growth of an important and genuinely Melanesian church.
An analysis of a scandal involving a doctor accused of allowing a number of women to develop cervical cancer from carcinoma in situ as part of an experiment he had been conducting since the 1960s into conservative treatment of the disease, to more broadly explore dramatic changes in medical history in the second half of the twentieth century.
Violence and intimacy were critically intertwined at all stages of the settler colonial encounter, and yet we know surprisingly little of how they were connected in the shaping of colonial economies. Extending a reading of 'economies' as labour relations into new arenas, this innovative collection of essays examines new understandings of the nexus between violence and intimacy in settler colonial economies of the British Pacific Rim. The sites it explores include cross-cultural exchange in sealing and maritime communities, labour relations on the frontier, inside the pastoral station and in the colonial home, and the material and emotional economies of exploration. Following the curious mobility of texts, objects, and frameworks of knowledge, this volume teases out the diversity of ways in which violence and intimacy were expressed in the economies of everyday encounters on the ground. In doing so, it broadens the horizon of debate about the nature of colonial economies and the intercultural encounters that were enmeshed within them.
This book explores the evolution of Canadian and Australian national identities in the era of decolonization by evaluating educational policies in Ontario, Canada, and Victoria, Australia. Drawing on sources such as textbooks and curricula, the book argues that Britishness, a sense of imperial citizenship connecting white Anglo-Saxons across the British Empire, continued to be a crucial marker of national identity in both Australia and Canada until the late 1960s and early 1970s, when educators in Ontario and Victoria abandoned Britishness in favor of multiculturalism. Chapters explore how textbooks portrayed imperialism, the close relationship between religious education and Britishness, and efforts to end assimilationist Anglocentrism and promote equality in education. The book contributes to British World scholarship by demonstrating how decolonization precipitated a massive search for identity in Ontario and Victoria that continues to challenge educators and policy-makers today. |
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