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Books > Humanities > History > World history > From 1900
Based on hitherto untapped source materials, this book charts the
history of Muslim missionary activity in London from 1912, when the
first Indian Muslim missionaries arrived in London, until 1944.
During this period a unique community was forged out of British
converts and native Muslims from various parts of the world, which
focused itself around a purpose built mosque in Woking and later
the first mosque to open in London in 1924. Arguing that an
understanding of Muslim mission in this period needs to place such
activity in the context of colonial encounter, Islam and Britain
provides a background narrative into why Muslim missionary activity
in London was part of a variety of strategies to engage with
European expansion and overzealous Christian missionary activity in
India. Ron Geaves draws on research undertaken in India and
Pakistan, where the Ahmadiya missionaries have kept extensive
archives of this period which until now have been unavailable to
scholars. Unique in providing an account of Islamic missionary work
in Britain from the Islamic perspective, Islam and Britain adds to
our knowledge and understanding of British Muslim history and makes
an important contribution to the literature concerned with Islamic
missiology.
In central Brussels stands a statue of a young woman. Built in
1923, it is the first monument to a working-class woman in European
history. Her name was Gabrielle Petit. History has forgotten Petit,
an ambitious and patriotic Belgian, executed by firing squad in
1916 for her role as an intelligence agent for the British Army.
After the First World War she was celebrated as an example of stern
endeavour, but a hundred years later her memory has faded. In the
first part of this historical biography Sophie De Schaepdrijver
uses Petit's life to explore gender, class and heroism in the
context of occupied Europe. Petit's experiences reveal the reality
of civilian engagement under military occupation and the emergence
of modern espionage. The second part of the book focuses on the
legacy and cultural memory of Petit and the First World War. By
analysing Petit's representation in ceremony, discourse and popular
culture De Schaepdrijver expands our understanding of remembrance
across the 20th century.
For the students of Colerain High School and their friends, life
in Cincinnati in the 1950s was an adventure. Now, one of their own
shares a look into their lives.
This is a story exposing the life of your grandparents. Yes, the
lives of your grandmother, the silver-haired beauty that bakes your
favorite cakes and cookies, who can soothe any hurt, and who allows
you to do anything you wish, and your grandfather, the gentleman,
of seemingly never-ending wisdom, experience, and knowledge, who
can guide you to the correct decision, and will never say no. In a
time long ago, the genteel women and the kindly men of today led a
completely different, seemingly out-ofcharacter life. This is a
chronicle of their escapades.
So you wanted to know just how your grandparents lived their
lives during the indestructible, wonderful, fantastic, and
unmindful time of their teenage life, then this is the story for
you, a real story, a story your grandparents will never tell, yet a
story they will never forget.
The history of oil is a chapter in the story of Europe's
geopolitical decline in the twentieth century. During the era of
the two world wars, a lack of oil constrained Britain and Germany
from exerting their considerable economic and military power
independently. Both nations' efforts to restore the independence
they had enjoyed during the Age of Coal backfired by inducing
strategic over-extension, which served only to hasten their demise
as great powers. Having fought World War I with oil imported from
the United States, Britain was determined to avoid relying upon
another great power for its energy needs ever again. Even before
the Great War had ended, Whitehall implemented a strategy of
developing alternative sources of oil under British control.
Britain's key supplier would be the Middle East - already a region
of vital importance to the British Empire - whose oil potential was
still unproven. As it turned out, there was plenty of oil in the
Middle East, but Italian hostility after 1935 threatened transit
through the Mediterranean. A shortage of tankers ruled out
re-routing shipments around Africa, forcing Britain to import oil
from US-controlled sources in the Western Hemisphere and depleting
its foreign exchange reserves. Even as war loomed in 1939,
therefore, Britain's quest for independence from the United States
had failed. Germany was in an even worse position than Britain. It
could not import oil from overseas in wartime due to the threat of
blockade, while accumulating large stockpiles was impossible
because of the economic and financial costs. The Third Reich went
to war dependent on petroleum synthesized from coal, domestic crude
oil, and overland imports, primarily from Romania. German leaders
were confident, however, that they had enough oil to fight a series
of short campaigns that would deliver to them the mastery of
Europe. This plan derailed following the victory over France, when
Britain continued to fight. This left Germany responsible for
Europe's oil requirements while cut off from world markets. A
looming energy crisis in Axis Europe, the absence of strategic
alternatives, and ideological imperatives all compelled Germany in
June 1941 to invade the Soviet Union and fulfill the Third Reich's
ultimate ambition of becoming a world power - a decision that
ultimately sealed its fate.
Fictions written between 1939 and 2005 by indigenous and white
(post)colonial women writers emerging from an African-European
cultural experience form the focus of this study. Their voyages
into the European diasporic space in Africa are important for
conveying how African women's literature is situated in relation to
colonialism. Notwithstanding the centrality of African literature
in the new postcolonial literatures in English, the accomplishments
of the indigenous writer Grace Ogot have been eclipsed by the
critical attention given to her male counterparts, while Elspeth
Huxley, Barbara Kimenye, and Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, who are of
Western cultural provenance but adopt an African perspective, are
not accommodated by the genre of 'expatriate literature'. The
present study of both indigenous and white (post)colonial women's
narratives that are common to both categories fills this gap.
Focused on the representation of gender, identity, culture, and the
'Other', the texts selected are set in Kenya and Uganda, and a main
concern is with the extent to which they are influenced by setting
and intercultural influences. The 'African' woman's creation of
textuality is at once the expression of female individualities and
a transgression of boundaries. The particular category of fiction
for children as written by Kimenye and Macgoye reveals the
configuration of a voice and identity for the female 'Other' and
writer which enables a subversive renegotiation of identity in the
face of patriarchal traditions.
The First World War at sea by Americans who fought in it
It's easy to understand why this book was originally published
under the jingoistic title of 'Over the Seas for Uncle Sam'-perhaps
edited by rather than 'written' by Elaine Sterne-for when it was
written the subject was nothing less than reportage. The passage of
time provides new perspectives on works such as this, and for that
reason we have changed the title to alert readers to the unique
nature of the content. Sterne's book contains fifteen first hand
accounts by those serving in the United States Navy in the first
American conflict of the modern age on a global stage. The United
States entry into the First World War in April, 1917, (particularly
in terms of it's immediately engaged naval contribution) was
pivotal, if not essential. The Allied war effort was being
strangled for want of materials as a result of the German U-Boat
successes against merchant shipping, especially in the Atlantic
Ocean. These accounts by serving men and women in the U. S
Navy-including contributions by marines-are mainly from the
enlisted ranks, with a few from officers. They are told in 'their
own words, ' and enable the modern student of the period to read of
the experiences of those service men and women whose voices-in the
absence of a work such as this-would have been forever lost to
posterity.
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.
Much has been written about the decline of the United Kingdom. The
Two Unions looks instead at the lengthy survival of the Union,
examining the institutions, structures, and individuals that have
contributed to its longevity. In order to understand its survival,
the author, one of the foremost historians of modern Ireland and of
the British-Irish relationship, sustains a comparison between the
Irish and Scots Unions, their respective origins and subsequent
development. He provides a detailed examination of the two
interlinked Unionist movements in Scotland and Ireland. Alvin
Jackson illuminates not only the history and varied health of the
United Kingdom over the past 300 years, but also its present
condition and prospects.
An essential new reference work for students and general readers
interested in the history, dynamics, and influence of
evangelicalism in recent American history, politics, and culture.
What makes evangelical or "born-again" Christians different from
those who identify themselves more simply as "Christian"? What
percentage of Americans believe in the Rapture? How are
evangelicalism and Baptism similar? What is the influence of
evangelical religions on U.S. politics? Readers of Evangelical
America: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Religious Culture
will learn the answers to these questions and many more through
this single-volume work's coverage of the many dimensions of and
diversity within evangelicalism and through its documentation of
the specific contributions evangelicals have made in American
society and culture. It also illustrates the Evangelical movement's
influence internationally in key issues such as human rights,
environmentalism, and gender and sexuality. Provides readers with
an understanding of contemporary American evangelicalism's history,
key individuals, organizations, and beliefs through detailed
coverage of more than 180 topics Documents the diversity of the
Evangelical movement under a common core umbrella of doctrinal
beliefs Displays the breadth of American evangelical interaction in
social and cultural issues and in debates in recent American
history
Hipsters have always used clothing, hairstyle, gesture, and slang
to mark their distance from consensus culture, yet it is music that
has always been the privileged means of cultural disaffiliation,
the royal road to hip. Hipness in postwar America became an
indelible part of the nation's intellectual and cultural landscape,
and during the past half century, hip sensibility has structured
self-understanding and self-representation, thought and art, in
various recognizable ways. Although hipness is a famously elusive
and changeable quality, what remains recognizable throughout its
history in American intellectual life is a particular conception of
the individual's alienation from society-alienation due not to any
specific political wrong but to something more radical, a clash of
perception and consciousness. The dominant culture thus constitutes
a system bent on foreclosing the creativity, self-awareness, and
self-expression by which people might find satisfaction in their
lives. The hipster's project is to imagine this system and define
himself against it; his task is to resist being stamped in its
uniform, squarish mold. Culture then becomes the primary medium of
hip resistance rather than political action as such, and this
resistance is manifested in aesthetic creation, be that artworks or
the very self. Music has stood consistently at the center of the
evolving and alienated hipster's self-structuring: every hip
subculture at least tags along with some kind of music (as the
musically ungifted Beats did with jazz), and for many subcultures
music is their raison d'etre. In Dig, author Phil Ford argues that
hipness is in fact wedded to music at an altogether deeper level.
In hip culture it is sound itself, and the faculty of hearing, that
is the privileged part of the sensory experience. Ford's discussion
of songs and albums in context of the social and political world
illustrates how hip intellectuals conceived of sound as a way of
challenging meaning - that which is cognitive and abstract,
timeless and placeless - with experience - that which is embodied,
concrete and anchored in place and time. Through Charlie Parker's
"Ornithology," Ken Nordine's "Sound Museum," Bob Dylan's "Ballad of
a Thin Man," and a string of other lucid and illuminating examples,
Ford shows why and how music became a central facet of hipness and
the counterculture. Shedding new light on an elusive and enigmatic
culture, Dig is essential reading for students and scholars of
popular music and culture, as well as anyone fascinated by the
counterculture movement of the mid-twentieth-century.
The string of military defeats during 1942 marked the end of
British hegemony in Southeast Asia, finally destroying the myth of
British imperial invincibility. The Japanese attack on Burma led to
a hurried and often poorly organized evacuation of Indian and
European civilians from the country. The evacuation was a public
humiliation for the British and marked the end of their role in
Burma."The Evacuation of Civilians from Burma" investigates the
social and political background to the evacuation, and the
consequences of its failure. Utilizing unpublished letters,
diaries, memoirs and official reports, Michael Leigh provides the
first comprehensive account of the evacuation, analyzing its source
in the structures of colonial society, fractured race relations and
in the turbulent politics of colonial Burma.
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