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Books > History > World history > From 1900 > First World War
This book is based on original research into intimidation and
violence directed at civilians by combatants during the
revolutionary period in Ireland, considering this from the
perspectives of the British, the Free State and the IRA. The book
combines qualitative and quantitative approaches, and focusses on
County Kerry, which saw high levels of violence. It demonstrates
that violence and intimidation against civilians was more common
than clashes between combatants and that the upsurge in violence in
1920 was a result of the deployment of the Black and Tans and
Auxiliaries, particularly in the autumn and winter of that year.
Despite the limited threat posed by the IRA, the British forces
engaged in unprecedented and unprovoked violence against civilians.
This study stresses the increasing brutality of the subsequent
violence by both sides. The book shows how the British had similar
methods and views as contemporary counter-revolutionary groups in
Europe. IRA violence, however, was, in part, an attempt to impose
homogeneity as, beneath the Irish republican narrative of popular
approval, there lay a recognition that universal backing was never
in fact present. The book is important reading for students and
scholars of the Irish revolution, the social history of Ireland and
inter-war European violence.
Imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during the First World War,
two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, cunningly join
forces. To stave off boredom, Jones makes a handmade Ouija board
and holds fake seances for fellow prisoners. One day, an Ottoman
official approaches him with a query: could Jones contact the
spirits to find a vast treasure rumoured to be buried nearby?
Jones, a lawyer, and Hill, a magician, use the Ouija board - and
their keen understanding of the psychology of deception-to build a
trap for their captors that will lead them to freedom. The
Confidence Men is a nonfiction thriller featuring strategy, mortal
danger and even high farce - and chronicles a profound but unlikely
friendship.
Museums, Modernity and Conflict examines the history of the
relationship between museums, collections and war, revealing how
museums have responded to and been shaped by war and conflicts of
various sorts. Written by a mixture of museum professionals and
academics and ranging across Europe, North America and the Middle
East, this book examines the many ways in which museums were
affected by major conflicts such as the World Wars, considers how
and why they attempted to contribute to the war effort, analyses
how wartime collecting shaped the nature of the objects held by a
variety of museums, and demonstrates how museums of war and of the
military came into existence during this period. Closely focused
around conflicts which had the most wide-ranging impact on museums,
this collection includes reflections on museums such as the Louvre,
the Stedelijk in the Netherlands, the Canadian War Museum and the
State Art Collections Dresden. Museums, Modernity and Conflict will
be of interest to academics and students worldwide, particularly
those engaged in the study of museums, war and history. Showing how
the past continues to shape contemporary museum work in a variety
of different and sometimes unexpected ways, the book will also be
of interest to museum practitioners.
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 Great War set in motion all of the subsequent violence of the
twentieth century. The war took millions of lives, led to the fall
of four empires, established new nations, and negatively affected
others. During and after the war, individuals and communities
struggled to find expression for their wartime encounters and
communal as well as individual mourning. Throughout this time of
enormous upheaval, many artists redefined their role in society,
among them writers, performers, painters, and composers. Some
sought to renew or re-establish their place in the postwar climate,
while others longed for an irretrievable past, and still others
tried to break with the past entirely. This volume offers a
significant interdisciplinary contribution to the study of modern
war, exploring the ways that artists contributed to wartime culture
- both representing and shaping it - as well as the ways in which
wartime culture influenced artistic expressions. Artists' places
within and against reconstruction efforts illuminate the struggles
of the day. The essays included represent a transnational
perspective and seek to examine how artists dealt with the
experience of conflict and mourning and their role in
(re-)establishing creative practices in the changing climate of the
interwar years.
The Remembered Dead explores the ways poets of the First World War
- and later poets writing in the memory of that war - address the
difficult question of how to remember, and commemorate, those
killed in conflict. It looks closely at the way poets struggled to
meaningfully represent dying, death, and the trauma of witness,
while responding to the pressing need for commemoration. The
authors pay close attention to specific poems while maintaining a
strong awareness of literary and philosophical contexts. The poems
are discussed in relation to modernism and myth, other forms of
commemoration (such as photographs and memorials), and theories of
cultural memory. There is fresh analysis of canonical poets which,
at the same time, challenges the confines of the canon by
integrating discussion of lesser-known figures, including
non-combatants and poets of later decades. The final chapter
reaches beyond the war's centenary in a discussion of one
remarkable commemoration of Wilfred Owen.
After the Second World War, war crimes prosecutors charged two of
King George VI's closest German relatives with 'crimes against
humanity'. American soldiers discovered top-secret documents at
Marburg Castle that exposed treacherous family double-dealing
inside the Royal Family. Two of the King's brothers had flirted
dangerously with the Nazi regime in duplicitous games of secret
diplomacy. To avert a potential public relations catastrophe,
George VI hid incriminating papers and, with Winston Churchill and
President Roosevelt's help, whitewashed history to protect his
family. Three of Philip Mountbatten's sisters were banned from
Westminster Abbey and the wedding of their brother to Princess
Elizabeth because their husbands were senior Nazi officers. This
dilemma was Queen Victoria's fatal legacy: she had hoped to secure
peace in Europe through a network of royal marriages, but her plan
backfired with two world wars. Tea With Hitler is a family saga of
duty, courage, wilful blindness and criminality, revealing the
tragic fate of a Saxe-Coburg princess murdered as part of the Nazi
euthanasia programme and the story of Queen Victoria's Jewish
great-grand-daughter, rescued by her British relatives.
Oswald Boelcke was Germanys first ace in World War One with a total
of forty victories. His character, inspirational leadership,
organisational genius, development of air-to-air tactics and impact
on aerial doctrine are all reasons why Boelcke remains an important
figure in the history of air warfare. Paving the way for modern air
forces across the world with his pioneering tactics, Boelcke had a
dramatic effect on his contemporaries. The fact that he was the Red
Barons mentor, instructor, squadron commander and friend
demonstrates the influence he had upon the German air force. He was
one of the first pilots to be awarded the famous Pour le Merite
commonly recognised as the Blue Max. All of this was achieved after
overcoming medical obstacles in his childhood and later life with a
willpower and determination. Boelcke even gained the admiration of
his enemies. After his tragic death in a midair collision, the
Royal Flying Corps dropped a wreath on his funeral, and several of
his victims sent another wreath from their German prison camp. His
name and legacy of leadership and inspiration live on, as seen in
the Luftwaffes designation of the Tactical Air Force Wing 31
Boelcke. In this definitive biography RG Head explores why Oswald
Boelcke deserves consideration as the most important fighter pilot
of the 20th century and beyond; but also for setting the standard
in military aviation flying. This book will appeal to enthusiasts
of the German air force, military aviation in general and World War
One in particular.
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.
The Forgotten Appeasement of 1920 examines a turning point in East
European history: the summer of 1920, when Lenin's Soviet Russia
decided to challenge the Versailles system and launch a military
attack on the continent. The outcome of this attack might have been
the occupation of all of Poland and East Central Europe, and a Red
Army sweep further west. This book probes the British-Soviet
negotiations and diplomatic operations behind the scenes. Professor
Nowak uses hitherto unexamined documents from Russian and British
archives to show how (and why) top British politicians were ready
to accept a new Russian imperial control over the whole of Eastern
Europe. Nowak unravels this previously untold story of that first
and forgotten appeasement, stopped only by the Polish military
victory over the Red Army. His excellent historical craftsmanship
and new sources contribute to the book's quality, filling up a
lacuna in contemporary historiography. This book will appeal to
researchers of geopolitical affairs and the Great Powers, the
history of Poland, and the political mentality of Western elites.
It will also be of interest to university students and tutors,
scholars of history and international relations and - thanks to the
book's brisk and fascinating narrative - amateur historians and
history aficionados.
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 juxtaposes national anthems of thirteen countries from
central Europe, with the aim of initiating a dialogue among the
peoples of East-Central Europe. We tend to perceive a national
anthem as a particular mirror, involuntarily reflecting an image of
nation and homeland; but how does it represent the community for
whom it sounds? To answer this question, the book deploys a
comparative approach - anthems are presented in the light of those
of neighbouring countries, with the conviction that one of the key
features of true Europeanness is good relations between neighbours.
The development trajectory of the modern nation is the context in
which the book examines the history of such national symbols,
alongside the symbolic content of poetry, images of the homeland
and nation depicted in the anthems, as well as the sometimes longer
processes which led to the adoption and legal codification of
current state symbols. The Anthems of East-Central Europe will be a
great resource for researchers, journalists, college and university
students, politicians trying to impact emigrees from this region
and emigrees themselves.
A new interpretation of the Sarajevo assassination and the origins
of World War I that places focus on the Balkans and the prewar
period. The story has so often been told: Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
heir to the throne of the Habsburg Empire, was shot dead on June
28, 1914, in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. Thirty days later,
the Archduke's uncle, Emperor Franz Joseph, declared war on the
Kingdom of Serbia, producing the chain reaction of European powers
entering the First World War. In Misfire, Paul Miller-Melamed
narrates the history of the Sarajevo assassination and the origins
of World War I from the perspective of the Balkans. Rather than
focusing on the bang of assassin Gavrilo Princip's gun or
reinforcing the mythology that has arisen around this act,
Miller-Melamed embeds the incident in the longer-term conditions of
the Balkans that gave rise to the political murder. He thus
illuminates the centrality of the Bosnian Crisis and the Balkan
Wars of the early twentieth century to European power politics,
while explaining how Serbs, Bosnians, and Habsburg leaders
negotiated their positions in an increasingly dangerous
geopolitical environment. Despite the absence of evidence tying
official Serbia to the assassination conspiracy, Miller-Melamed
shows how it spiraled into a diplomatic crisis that European
statesmen proved unable to resolve peacefully. Contrasting the vast
disproportionality between a single deadly act and an act of war
that would leave ten million dead, Misfire contends that the real
causes for the world war lie in "civilized" Europe rather than the
endlessly discussed political murder.
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.
Organised chronologically by type, German Aircraft of World War I
offers a highly-illustrated guide to the main types of aircraft
used by the German Air Force during World War I. The book offers a
comprehensive survey of German aircraft, from the Albatros B.1 and
Fokker E.II of the early years, to the more sophisticated Fokker
D.VII and Junkers CL.1 of the final months of the war. All the
major and many minor types are featured, including monoplanes,
biplanes, single-seater fighters, two-seater fighters, bombers,
ground attack aircraft, night bombers, giant bombers and
floatplanes. This includes both well-known and lesser- known
models, such as the LVG and Pfalz single-seater fighters, the Gotha
and Zeppelin Staaken large bombers, AEG ground attack aircraft, and
the Albatross, Halberstadt and Brandenburg two-seater biplanes.
Each featured profile includes authentic markings and colour
schemes, while every separate model is accompanied by exhaustive
specifications. Packed with 110 full-colour artworks with detailed
specifications, German Aircraft of World War I is a key reference
guide for military modellers and World War I enthusiasts.
America's entry into World War One in April 1917 marked the end of
one era in the nation's history and the start of another. As
acclaimed historian Michael S. Neiberg reveals in his compelling
new work, the Great War erupted in the midst of lively domestic
debate as to what America's role should be in the global sphere.
Whereas Woodrow Wilson was re-elected in 1916 by pledging to stay
out of the conflict in Europe, former president Theodore Roosevelt
was convinced that the war offered a means for the U.S. to become a
dominant power and ensure national security. In The Road Over
There, Neiberg follows American reactions to such events as the
Lusitania, German espionage, and the Zimmermann telegram, shedding
light on the dilemmas and crises that the country faced in the war
years. In the summer of 1916, German agents detonated the Black Tom
railroad terminal in Jersey City, New Jersey, leaving only
fragments of piers (still visible today); it was the costliest act
of domestic terrorism in American history before 9/11 and its
effect was galvanizing. Neiberg's book will revive debates around
America's entry into World War One, building to Wilson's
declaration while examining the forces and shifts that made it all
but inevitable. Neiberg establishes beyond question that World War
One was not a parenthetical exception in American history but a
moment of national and international self-identification, one whose
effects still resonate today.
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.
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.
This book explores, from a transnational viewpoint, the historical
relationship between war veterans and fascism in interwar Europe.
Until now, historians have been roughly divided between those who
assume that 'brutalization' (George L. Mosse) led veterans to join
fascist movements and those who stress that most ex-soldiers of the
Great War became committed pacifists and internationalists.
Transcending the debates of the brutalization thesis and drawing
upon a wide range of archival and published sources, this work
focuses on the interrelated processes of transnationalization and
the fascist permeation of veterans' politics in interwar Europe to
offer a wider perspective on the history of both fascism and
veterans' movements. A combination of mythical constructs,
transfers, political communication, encounters and networks within
a transnational space explain the relationship between veterans and
fascism. Thus, this book offers new insights into the essential
ties between fascism and war, and contributes to the theorization
of transnational fascism.
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