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Books > History > World history > From 1900 > First World War
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.
Australia, Wilkommen (1990) documents the rich and varying
contribution made by Germans in Australia. Originally welcomed as
hardy pioneers, German settlers were responsible for discovering
and opening up vast tracts of land. German scientists and
entrepreneurs played a large role in the Australian economy. But as
the German empire expanded into the Pacific, and Britain and
Australia were drawn into two world wars, perceptions of Germany
and its people changed and immigrants were caught in the crossfire
between the old and new worlds. This book examines these issues
surrounding German immigration into Australia, and the shifting
perceptions of both the immigrants and the nation itself.
On a summer's day on the Somme in 1916, one brave battalion lost
half its men to enemy fire in an hour. What went wrong? Martha
Kearey dressed in black for the rest of her life in memory of the
four sons she lost on that day in the First World War, proudly
wearing each of their medals in turn on Sundays. Nearly a century
on, her grandson Terence has set out to do justice to the memory of
his uncles and their colleagues with a full account of the role of
their Battalion, the Kensingtons, on the Somme in the summer of
1916. The Kensingtons, guardians of the right flank on the
battlefront at Gommecourt, were ordered to march on the enemy
without proper preparation in a move later condemned as foolhardy
and suicidal. That summer's day, cut to pieces by enemy artillery,
they lost half their men in less than an hour. Kearey sets out a
candid account of the action, examining why this tragic and
unnecessary slaughter was allowed to happen.
A fresh, nuanced look at an extraordinary woman and her lifelong
fight for justice. Defying the constraints of her gender and class,
Emily Hobhouse travelled across continents and spoke out against
oppression. A passionate pacifist and a feminist, she opposed both
the 1899-1902 Anglo-Boer War and World War One, leading to
accusations of treason. Elsabe Brits travelled in her footsteps to
bring to life a colourful story of war, heroism and passion,
spanning three continents.
The outbreak of the First World War saw an upsurge of patriotism.
The Church generally saw the war as justified, and many clergy
encouraged the men in their congregations to join the army. There
was, however, already a strong strand of anti-war sentiment,
opposed to the dominant theology of the Establishment. This was
partly based on traditional Christian pacifism, but included other
religious, social and political influences. Campaigners and
conscientious objectors voiced a growing concern about the huge
human cost of a conflict seemingly endlessly bogged down in the mud
of the Flanders poppy fields. 'Subversive Peacemakers' recounts the
stories of a strong and increasingly organised opposition to war,
from peace groups to poets, from preachers to politicians, from
women to working men, all of whom struggled to secure peace in a
militarised and fragmenting society. Clive Barrett demonstrates
that the Church of England provided an unlikely setting for much of
this war resistance. Barrett masterfully narrates the story of the
peace movement, bringing together stories of war-resistance until
now lost, disregarded or undervalued. The people involved, as well
as the dramatic events of the conflict themselves, are seen in a
new light.
For centuries, battleships provided overwhelming firepower at sea.
They were not only a major instrument of warfare, but a visible
emblem of a nation's power, wealth and pride. The rise of the
aircraft carrier following the Japanese aerial strike on Pearl
Harbor in 1941 highlighted the vulnerabilities of the battleship,
bringing about its demise as a dominant class of warship. This book
offers a detailed guide to the major types of battleships to fight
in the two World Wars. Explore HMS Dreadnought, the first of a
class of fast, big-gun battleships to be developed at the beginning
of the 20th century; see the great capital ships that exchanged
salvos at the battle of Jutland, including the German battlecruiser
Derfflinger, which sank the British battleship Queen Mary; find out
about the destruction of HMS Hood, which exploded after exchanging
fire with the Bismarck, which itself was sunk after a
trans-Atlantic chase by a combination of battery fire and
aircraft-launched torpedoes; and be amazed at the
'super-battleship' Yamato, which despite its size and firepower,
made minimal contribution to Japan's war effort and was sunk by air
attack during the defence of Okinawa. Illustrated with more than
120 vivid artworks and photographs, Technical Guide: Battleships of
World War I and World War II is an essential reference guide for
modellers and naval warfare enthusiasts.
All the guns examined in this new paperback edition of Machine Guns
of World War 1 belong to the class known as "automatic" and seven
classic World War 1 weapons are illustrated in some 250 color
photographs. Detailed sequences shows them in close-up: during
step-by-step field stripping, and during handling, loading and live
firing trials with ball ammunition, by gunners wearing period
uniforms to put these historic guns in their visual context. These
fascinating photographs are accompanied by concise, illustrated
accounts of each weapon's historical and technical background. The
reader will learn exactly what it looked like, sounded like and
felt like to crew the German, British and French machine guns which
dominated the battlefields of the Western Front in 1914-18, and
which changed infantry tactics forever.
America's Arab Nationalists focuses in on the relationship between
Arab nationalists and Americans in the struggle for independence in
an era when idealistic Americans could see the Arab nationalist
struggle as an expression of their own values. In the first three
decades of the twentieth century (from the 1908 Ottoman revolution
to the rise of Hitler), important and influential Americans,
including members of the small Arab-American community,
intellectually, politically and financially participated in the
construction of Arab nationalism. This book tells the story of a
diverse group of people whose contributions are largely unknown to
the American public. The role Americans played in the development
of Arab nationalism has been largely unexplored by historians,
making this an important and original contribution to scholarship.
This volume is of great interest to students and academics in the
field, though the narrative style is accessible to anoyone
interested in Arab nationalism, the conflict between Zionists and
Palestinians, and the United States' relationship with the Arab
world.
This volume deals with the multiple impacts of the First World War
on societies from South Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa,
usually largely overlooked by the historiography on the conflict.
Due to the lesser intensity of their military involvement in the
war (neutrals or latecomers), these countries or regions were
considered "peripheral" as a topic of research. However, in the
last two decades, the advances of global history recovered their
importance as active wartime actors and that of their experiences.
This book will reconstruct some experiences and representations of
the war that these societies built during and after the conflict
from the prism of mediators between the war fought in the
battlefields and their homes, as well as the local appropriations
and resignifications of their experiences and testimonies.
The global impact of the First World War dominated the history of
the first half of the twentieth century. This major reassessment of
the origins of the war, based on extensive original research in
several countries, is the first full analysis of the politics of
armaments in pre-1914 Europe. David Stevenson directs attention
away from the Anglo-German naval race towards the competition on
land between the continental armies. He analyses the defence
policies of the Powers, and the interaction between the growth of
military preparedness and the diplomatic crises in the
Mediterranean and the Balkans that culminated in the events of
July-August 1914. Drawing on insights from political science, the
book offers a fresh conceptual framework for the origins of the
First World War, and provides a thought-provoking case-study of the
broader relationships between armaments and international conflict.
The literary canon of World War I - celebrated for realizing the
experience of an entire generation - ignores writing by women. The
war brought home to women the sorrow of the loss of husbands,
lovers and relatives as well as more revolutionary knowledge gained
through the experience of working in munitions factories and as
ambulance drivers, police, nurses and spies. During all this time
women wrote - letters, poetry, novels, short stories and memoirs.
This volume of mutually reflective essays brings writing from
Britain, America, France, Germany, Australia and Russia into
literary focus.
Writers at War addresses the most immediate representations of the
First World War in the prose of Ford Madox Ford, May Sinclair,
Siegfried Sassoon and Mary Borden; it interrogates the various ways
in which these writers contended with conveying their war
experience from the temporal and spatial proximity of the warzone
and investigates the multifarious impact of the war on the
(re)development of their aesthetics. It also interrogates to what
extent these texts aligned with or challenged existing social,
cultural, philosophical and aesthetic norms. While this book is
concerned with literary technique, the rich existing scholarship on
questions of gender, trauma and cultural studies on World War I
literature serves as a foundation. This book does not oppose these
perspectives but offers a complementary approach based on close
critical reading. The distinctiveness of this study stems from its
focus on the question of representation and form and on the
specific role of the war in the four authors' literary careers.
This is the first scholarly work concerned exclusively with
theorising prose written from the immediacy of the war. This book
is intended for academics, researchers, PhD candidates,
postgraduates and anyone interested in war literature.
During the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire, the ethnic
tensions between the minority populations within the empire led to
the administration carrying out a systematic destruction of the
Armenian people. This not only brought two thousand years of
Armenian civilisation within Anatolia to an end but was accompanied
by the mass murder of Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians.
Containing a selection of papers presented at "The Genocide of the
Christian Populations of the Ottoman Empire and its Aftermath
(1908-1923)" international conference, hosted by the Chair for
Pontic Studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, this
book draws on unpublished archival material and an innovative
historiographical approach to analyze events and their legacy in
comparative perspective. In order to understand the historical
context of the Ottoman Genocide, it is important to study, apart
from the Armenian case, the fate of the Greek and Assyrian peoples,
providing a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity of
the situation. This volume is primarily a research contribution but
should also be valued as a supplementary text that would provide
secondary reading for undergraduates and postgraduate students.
Between 1914 and 1918, military, press and amateur photographers
produced thousands of pictures. Either classified in military
archives specially created with this purpose in 1915, collected in
personal albums or circulated in illustrated magazines, photographs
were supposed to tell the story of the war. Picturing the Western
Front argues that photographic practices also shaped combatants and
civilians' war experiences. Doing photography (taking pictures,
posing for them, exhibiting, cataloguing and looking at them)
allowed combatants and civilians to make sense of what they were
living through. Photography mattered because it enabled combatants
and civilians to record events, establish or reinforce bonds with
one another, represent bodies, place people and events in
imaginative geographies and making things visible, while making
others, such as suicide, invisible. Photographic practices became,
thus, frames of experience. -- .
How did German intelligence agents in the First World War use dead
fish to pass on vital information to their operatives? What did an
advertisement for a dog in The Times have to do with the movement
of British troops into Egypt? And why did British personnel become
suspicious about the trousers hanging on a Belgian woman's washing
line? During the First World War, spymasters and their networks of
secret agents developed many ingenious - and occasionally hilarious
- methods of communication. Puffs of smoke from a chimney, stacks
of bread in a bakery window, even knitted woollen jumpers were all
used to convey secret messages decipherable only by well-trained
eyes. Melanie King retells the astonishing story of these and many
other tricks of the espionage trade, now long forgotten, through
the memoirs of eight spies. Among them are British intelligence
officers working undercover in France and Germany, including a
former officer from the Metropolitan Police who once hunted Jack
the Ripper. There is also the German Secret Service officer,
codenamed Agricola, who spied on the Eastern Front, an American
newspaperman and an Austrian agent who disguised himself as
everything from a Jewish pedlar to a Russian officer. Drawing on
the words of many of the spies themselves, Secrets in a Dead Fish
is a fascinating compendium of clever and original ruses that casts
new light into the murky world of espionage during the First World
War.
First World War-based ex-servicemen's organisations found
themselves facing an existential crisis with the onset of the
Second World War. This book examines how two such groups, the
British and American Legions, adapted cognitively to the emergence
of yet another world war and its veterans in the years 1938 through
1946. With collective identities and socio-political programmes
based in First World War memory, both Legions renegotiated existing
narratives of that war and the lessons they derived from those
narratives as they responded to the unfolding Second World War in
real time. Using the previous war as a "learning experience" for
the new one privileged certain understandings of that conflict over
others, inflecting its meaning for each Legion moving forward.
Breaking the Second World War down into its constituent events to
trace the evolution of First World War memory through everyday
invocations, this unprecedented comparison of the British and
American Legions illuminates the ways in which differing
international, national, and organisational contexts intersected to
shape this process as well as the common factors affecting it in
both groups. The book will appeal most to researchers of the
ex-service movement, First World War memory, and the cultural
history of the Second World War.
A war in the skies above the waves
As early as 1908 the Royal Navy understood the potential for the
use of aircraft in naval warfare. By 1914 the Royal Naval Air
Service consisted of 93 aircraft, 6 airships, 2 balloons and 727
personnel. By 1918 when the RNAS was combined with the RAF it had
nearly 3,000 aircraft and more than 55,000 personnel. Aircraft
working in concert with the Royal Navy and against enemy shipping
and coastal installations had come to stay. This interesting book
looks at the RNAS from a much more personal perspective-that of one
young navy pilot, Harold Rosher. The book tells the story of
Rosher's war, based around Dover and engaged in patrolling over and
across the English Channel and attacking enemy held coastal
defences such as Zeebrugge, principally through letters to his
family and provides vital insights into the First World War in the
air as experienced by an early naval pilot. Available in softcover
and hardcover with dust jacket
This book examines the history of Herbert Hoover's Commission for
Relief in Belgium, which supplied humanitarian aid to the millions
of civilians trapped behind German lines in Belgium and Northern
France during World War I. Here, Clotilde Druelle focuses on the
little-known work of the CRB in Northern France, crossing
continents and excavating neglected archives to tell the story of
daily life under Allied blockade in the region. She shows how the
survival of 2.3 million French civilians came to depend upon the
transnational mobilization of a new sort of diplomatic actor-the
non-governmental organization. Lacking formal authority, the
leaders of the CRB claimed moral authority, introducing the
concepts of a "humanitarian food emergency" and "humanitarian
corridors" and ushering in a new age of international relations and
American hegemony.
This book examines the particular experience of ethnic, religious
and national minorities who participated in the First World War as
members of the main belligerent powers: Britain, France, Germany
and Russia. Individual chapters explore themes including contested
loyalties, internment, refugees, racial violence, genocide and
disputed memories from 1914 through into the interwar years to
explore how minorities made the transition from war to peace at the
end of the First World War. The first section discusses so-called
'friendly minorities', considering the way in which Jews, Muslims
and refugees lived through the war and its aftermath. Section two
looks at fears of 'enemy aliens', which prompted not only
widespread internment, but also violence and genocide. The third
section considers how the wartime experience of minorities played
out in interwar Europe, exploring debates over political
representation and remembrance. Bridging the gap between war and
peace, this is the ideal book for all those interested in both
First World War and minority histories.
Black Shame offers a detailed analysis of the recruitment and
deployment of - and reactions to - African soldiers in the WWI
European theatre of war. In so doing, the book paints a vivid
picture of the wider debates of race and national identity provoked
by the use of African troops within the main actors on the WWI
scene: France, Britain, Germany and even the US. Drawing on
war-time attitudes, Dick van Galen Last explores the reality and
long-term consequences of the participation of African regiments in
the post-war occupation of the German territories. Wide-ranging,
both geographically and thematically, the first publication of its
kind, Black Shame adds a fresh, truly comparative perspective to
the scholarship in the fields of imperial and military history, as
well as war studies and postcolonial studies, and will appeal to
academics and postgraduate students alike.
Writers at War addresses the most immediate representations of the
First World War in the prose of Ford Madox Ford, May Sinclair,
Siegfried Sassoon and Mary Borden; it interrogates the various ways
in which these writers contended with conveying their war
experience from the temporal and spatial proximity of the warzone
and investigates the multifarious impact of the war on the
(re)development of their aesthetics. It also interrogates to what
extent these texts aligned with or challenged existing social,
cultural, philosophical and aesthetic norms. While this book is
concerned with literary technique, the rich existing scholarship on
questions of gender, trauma and cultural studies on World War I
literature serves as a foundation. This book does not oppose these
perspectives but offers a complementary approach based on close
critical reading. The distinctiveness of this study stems from its
focus on the question of representation and form and on the
specific role of the war in the four authors' literary careers.
This is the first scholarly work concerned exclusively with
theorising prose written from the immediacy of the war. This book
is intended for academics, researchers, PhD candidates,
postgraduates and anyone interested in war literature.
WINNER of the International Affairs Book of the Year at the
Political Book Awards 2014Longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize
2013 The First World War followed a period of sustained peace in
Europe during which people talked with confidence of prosperity,
progress and hope. But in 1914, Europe walked into a catastrophic
conflict which killed millions of its men, bled its economies dry,
shook empires and societies to pieces, and fatally undermined
Europe's dominance of the world. It was a war which could have been
avoided up to the last moment-so why did it happen? Beginning in
the early nineteenth century, and ending with the assassination of
Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand, award-winning historian Margaret
MacMillan uncovers the huge political and technological changes,
national decisions and -- just as important-the small moments of
human muddle and weakness that led Europe from peace to disaster.
This masterful exploration of how Europe chose its path towards war
will change and enrich how we see this defining moment in our
history.
A classic text that has been updated across the chapters, giving
students a broad perspective on all the work done since the text
was originally written, as well as the original perspective. A new
introduction examines the topics and arguments that historians have
raised since the original text was written, explaining what is new
about them and their impact on the original text, giving students
the tools to anaylse the context of the new material. Includes a
new timeline, and fully updated further reading, providing extended
context for students reading the text.
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