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Books > Humanities > History > World history > From 1900 > First World War
How the Great War came to the cinema screen
Everyone familiar with motion picture footage of the First World
War on the Western Front will certainly have witnessed the talent,
daring, uniquely invaluable and enduring work of the author of this
book, Geoffrey Malins. Malins was one of two 'Official War Office
Kinematographers' authorised to film the allied armies in action in
France. There have been comments detrimental to Malins' character,
he might have been guilty of embellishment as regards his own
actions (no strange phenomenon in a military memoir) and he
certainly downplayed the role of his colleague J. B. McDowell to
the point of invisibility, but it is pointless to concentrate on
the imperfections of the man when balanced against his indisputable
achievements. One thing is certain, our knowledge of the Great War
would be poorer without Malins. Here was a 'movie man' prepared to
go into the danger zone to record the reality of the war of wire,
the blood and trenches the ordinary 'Tommy' knew, while dragging
around the most cumbersome equipment. His most famous film, 'The
Battle of the Somme, ' filmed in 1916 and considered to be
excessively graphic by many at the time, was viewed by over 20
million people and is shown on television to the present day.
Despite producing some now well known fake 'over the top'
sequences, Malins was responsible for the iconic footage of the
blowing of the Hawthorn Crater and anyone interested in the Great
War and the earliest days of war cinematography will be fascinated
to read the story of how it came about. The exploits of Malins and
his colleagues make no less gripping reading.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each
title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our
hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their
spines and fabric head and tail bands.
The Great War is still seen as a mostly European war. The Middle
Eastern theater is, at best, considered a sideshow written from the
western perspective. This book fills an important gap in the
literature by giving an insight through annotated translations from
five Ottoman memoirs, previously not available in English, of
actors who witnessed the last few years of Turkish presence in the
Arab lands. It provides the historical background to many of the
crises in the Middle East today, such as the Arab-Israeli
confrontation, the conflict-ridden emergence of Syria and Lebanon,
the struggle over the holy places of Islam in the Hejaz, and the
mutual prejudices of Arabs and Turks about each other.
Fighting Hoosiers: Indiana in Two World Wars tells the compelling,
heartbreaking, and breathtaking stories of some of the hundreds of
thousands of Hoosiers who served their country during the First and
Second World Wars. Drawn from the rich holdings of the Indiana
Magazine of History, a journal of state and midwestern history
published since 1905, the collection includes original diaries,
letters and memoirs, as well as research essays-all of them focused
on Hoosiers in the two world wars. Readers will meet Alex Arch, a
Hungarian-born immigrant who was the first American to fire a shot
in World War I; Maude Essig, a nurse serving with the American Red
Cross in wartime France; Kenneth Baker, a soldier in the Army
Signal Corps, who crawled across French fields (sometimes over and
around dead bodies) to lay phone lines for military communications;
and Bernard Rice, a combat medic who witnessed the liberation of
the Dachau concentration camp in 1945. Indiana's brave men and
women like these have served with distinction in the armed forces
since the earliest days of the Indiana Territory. Fighting Hoosiers
offers a compelling glimpse at some of their remarkable stories.
First published in 1914, this is a systematic treatment of the
people whose contribution to civilization of the Nile Valley was
for so long a source of controversy.
The Politics of Wounds explores military patients' experiences of
frontline medical evacuation, war surgery, and the social world of
military hospitals during the First World War. The proximity of the
front and the colossal numbers of wounded created greater public
awareness of the impact of the war than had been seen in previous
conflicts, with serious political consequences. Frequently referred
to as 'our wounded', the central place of the soldier in society,
as a symbol of the war's shifting meaning, drew contradictory
responses of compassion, heroism, and censure. Wounds also stirred
romantic and sexual responses. This volume reveals the paradoxical
situation of the increasing political demand levied on citizen
soldiers concurrent with the rise in medical humanitarianism and
war-related charitable voluntarism. The physical gestures and
poignant sounds of the suffering men reached across the classes,
giving rise to convictions about patient rights, which at times
conflicted with the military's pragmatism. Why, then, did patients
represent military medicine, doctors and nurses in a negative
light? The Politics of Wounds listens to the voices of wounded
soldiers, placing their personal experience of pain within the
social, cultural, and political contexts of military medical
institutions. The author reveals how the wounded and disabled found
culturally creative ways to express their pain, negotiate power
relations, manage systemic tensions, and enact forms of 'soft
resistance' against the societal and military expectations of
masculinity when confronted by men in pain. The volume concludes by
considering the way the state ascribed social and economic values
on the body parts of disabled soldiers though the pension system.
This book tackles cultural mobilization in the First World War as a
plural process of identity formation and de-formation. It explores
eight different settings in which individuals, communities and
conceptual paradigms were mobilized. Taking an interdisciplinary
approach, it interrogates one of the most challenging facets of the
history of the Great War, one that keeps raising key questions on
the way cultures respond to times of crisis. Mobilization during
the First World War was a major process of material and imaginative
engagement unfolding on a military, economic, political and
cultural level, and existing identities were dramatically
challenged and questioned by the whirl of discourses and
representations involved.
Healing the nation is a study of caregiving during the Great War,
exploring life behind the lines for ordinary British soldiers who
served on the Western Front. Using a variety of literary, artistic,
and architectural evidence, this study draws connections between
the war machine and the wartime culture of caregiving: the product
of medical knowledge and procedure, social relationships and health
institutions that informed experiences of rest, recovery and
rehabilitation in sites administered by military and voluntary-aid
authorities. Rest huts, hospitals, and rehabilitation centres
served not only as means to sustain manpower and support for the
war but also as distinctive sites where soldiers, their caregivers
and the public attempted to make sense of the conflict and the
unprecedented change it wrought. Revealing aspects of wartime life
that have received little attention, this study shows that
Britain's 'generation of 1914' was a group bound as much by a
comradeship of healing as by a comradeship of the trenches. The
author has used an extensive collection of illustrations in his
discussion, and the book will make fascinating reading for students
and specialists in the history of war, medicine and gender studies.
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This is the first ever major study examining of the views of the
Conservative Party towards the key aspects of Anglo-German
relations from 1905 to 1914. Drawing on a wide variety of original
sources, it examines the Conservative response to the German
threat, and argues that the response of the Conservative Party
towards Germany showed a marked absence of open hostility towards
Germany. Overall, this important new study provides a powerful and
overdue corrective to the traditional depiction of the Conservative
Party in opposition as 'Scaremongers' and the chief source of
Germanophobic views among the British political parties.
On April 25th 1915, during the First World War, the famous Anzacs
landed ashore at Gallipoli. At the exact same moment, leading
figures of Armenian life in the Ottoman Empire were being arrested
in vast numbers. That dark day marks the simultaneous birth of a
national story - and the beginning of a genocide. When We Dead
Awaken - the first narrative history of the Armenian Genocide in
decades - draws these two landmark historical events together.
James Robins explores the accounts of Anzac Prisoners of War who
witnessed the genocide, the experiences of soldiers who risked
their lives to defend refugees, and Australia and New Zealand's
participation in the enormous post-war Armenian relief movement. By
exploring the vital political implications of this unexplored
history, When We Dead Awaken questions the national folklore of
Australia, New Zealand, and Turkey - and the mythology of Anzac Day
itself.
The war of the French volunteers
This book does not concern the Battle of Verdun in 1916--widely
considered to be the largest battle in world history, rather it
positions the action geographically for the reader. Written during
wartime this account concerns the personal experiences of a young
officer of the French infantry from the earliest days of the Great
War through a period of comparative fluidity of movement before the
stalemate of trench warfare. The fighting concerns the actions
about the Meuse and the Marne in the first year of the war from a
French perspective and concludes as the 'armies go to earth' in the
early part of 1915. Genevoix takes the reader into the heart of his
enthusiastic young group of comrades and soldiers on campaign to
provide valuable insights into the opening phases of the great
conflict the French infantry knew. Available in soft cover and hard
cover with dust jacket.
This book, the second in a planned three-part series, looks at the
remainder of Sankes aviator cards numbered 544-685. Sanke, Liersch
and NPG postcards featuring German World War I aviators have been
collected, traded, and reproduced in many publications over the
years, but no author until now has focused on determining when,
where, why, and by whom these pictures were taken, or when and why
they were issued as postcards. This work pursues the answers to
those questions, and while doing so unfolds like a detective story.
At its heart is the vast collection of supportive photographs,
including some of the original images behind the postcards - many
have rarely, if ever, been viewed by the modern public.
This is the compelling story of West Belfast's involvement fighting
on the Western Front throughout the First World War. This is the
story of men from either side of West Belfast's sectarian divide
during the Great War. This dramatic book tells the story of the
volunteers of the 36th and 16th divisions who fought on the Somme
and side-by-side at Messines. Grayson also brings in forgotten West
Belfast men from throughout the armed forces, from the retreat at
Mons to the defeat of Germany and life post-war. In so doing, he
tells a new story which challenges popular perceptions of the war
and explains why remembrance remains so controversial in Belfast
today.
In this book, seven internationally renowned experts on Japanese
and Asian history have come together to investigate, with
innovative methodological approaches, various aspects of the
Japanese experience during and after the First World War.
Why, despite the appalling conditions in the trenches of the
Western Front, was the British army almost untouched by major
mutiny during the First World War? Drawing upon an extensive range
of sources, including much previously unpublished archival
material, G. D. Sheffield seeks to answer this question by
examining a crucial but previously neglected factor in the
maintenance of the British army's morale in the First World War:
the relationship between the regimental officer and the ordinary
soldier.
During the First World War approximately 210,000 Irish men and a
much smaller, but significant, number of Irish women served in the
British armed forces. All were volunteers and a very high
proportion were from Catholic and Nationalist communities. This
book is the first comprehensive analysis of Irish recruitment
between 1914 and 1918 for the island of Ireland as a whole. It
makes extensive use of previously neglected internal British army
recruiting returns held at The National Archives, Kew, along with
other valuable archival and newspaper sources. There has been a
tendency to discount the importance of political factors in Irish
recruitment, but this book demonstrates that recruitment campaigns
organised under the auspices of the Irish National Volunteers and
Ulster Volunteer Force were the earliest and some of the most
effective campaigns run throughout the war. The British government
conspicuously failed to create an effective recruiting organisation
or to mobilise civic society in Ireland. While the military
mobilisation which occurred between 1914 and 1918 was the largest
in Irish history, British officials persistently characterised it
as inadequate, threatening to introduce conscription in 1918. This
book also reflects on the disparity of sacrifice between North-East
Ulster and the rest of Ireland, urban and rural Ireland, and
Ireland and Great Britain.
I cannot stop while there are lives to be saved
Edith Cavell
Nurse Edith Cavell was a British Nurse and humanitarian who became
famous during the First World War for not only nursing and saving
the lives of battle casualties with no regard for the nationality
of the combatants, but also for her work in assisting some 200
Allied soldiers to escape incarceration by the victorious German
Army in Belgium during the early stages of the conflict. This
middle aged nurse was discovered by the Germans, who considered her
actions treasonable, abetting the escape of troops who might return
to the battle front. Cavell was subsequently tried by court
marshal, sentenced to be executed and shot by firing squad in
October 1915, aged 50 years. The event was widely reported by the
world press and the effect on the public at large was electric
providing a propaganda triumph for the Allied cause and an equal
disaster for the German cause-although they considered their
actions fair and reasonable by the rules of war. Cavell's influence
on nursing in Belgium has been an enduring one. This book contains
two accounts brought together by Leonaur for interest and good
value. The first, The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell by William Thomson
Hill, provides an overview of the Cavell story whilst the second,
With Edith Cavell in Belgium by Jacqueline Van Til, was written by
a young nurse who worked closely with Cavell and who had inside
knowledge and personal experience of the dramatic events as they
unfolded. Available in softcover and hardcover with dust jacket.
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