A fine author's view of the Great Somme Offensive
For many years there were few more highly regarded histories of the momentous Battle of the Somme, 1916, than that written by John Buchan, the renowned author of 'The Thirty Nine Steps, ' 'Greenmantle, ' 'Huntingtower' and many others. In both his fiction and non-fiction Buchan had the ability to craft a fine narrative in an easy going, economic style. Today Buchan is far less well-known for his non-fiction than for his fiction and that, perhaps, is inevitable. Nevertheless, he was responsible for a very substantial multi-volume history of the First World War which his consummate skill as a writer has ensured remains readable, often quoted and relevant. There were several versions of Buchan's 'Battle of the Somme' published during and soon after the First World War, sometimes in several volumes each dealing with different phases of the battle. This unique, never before in print, Leonaur Original, brings together all the text and all the illustrations and photographs from those various editions to create, what we believe to be the definitive version of the book. Fought over a period of nearly five months, between July and November of 1916, the Battle of the Somme became one of the defining battles, both of world history and the First World War. Over 1,000,000 men were killed or wounded in the course of the fighting which has made it, because of its inconclusive outcome, emblematic of the lives wasted during the war and of the implied incompetence of military commanders throughout the conflict.
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.

Concern about the 'decline of community', and the theme of 'community spirit', are internationally widespread in the modern world. The English past has featured many representations of declining community, expressed by those who lamented its loss in quite different periods and in diverse genres. This book analyses how community spirit and the passing of community have been described in the past - whether for good or ill - with an eye to modern issues, such as the so-called 'loneliness epidemic' or the social consequences of alternative structures of community. It does this through examination of authors such as Thomas Hardy, James Wentworth Day, Adrian Bell and H.E. Bates, by appraising detective fiction writers, analysing parish magazines, considering the letter writing of the parish poor in the 18th and 19th centuries, and through the depictions of realist landscape painters such as George Morland. K. D. M. Snell addresses modern social concerns, showing how many current preoccupations had earlier precedents. In presenting past representations of declining communities, and the way these affected individuals of very different political persuasions, the book draws out lessons and examples from the past about what community has meant hitherto, setting into context modern predicaments and judgements about 'spirits of community' today.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond explores the complex and diverse reverberations of the Second World War after 1945. It focuses on the legacies that National Socialist violence and genocide perpetrated in Europe continue to have in German-speaking countries and communities, as well as among those directly affected by occupation, terror and mass murder. Furthermore it explores how those legacies are in turn shaped by the present. The volume also considers conflicting, unexpected and often dissonant interpretations and representations of these events, made by those who were the witnesses, victims and perpetrators at the time and also by different communities in the generations that followed. The contributions, from a range of disciplinary perspectives, enrich our understanding of the complexity of the ways in which a disturbing past continues to disrupt the present and how the past is in turn disturbed and instrumentalized by a later present.

This eye-opening study gives a nuanced, provocative account of how German soldiers in the Great War experienced and enacted masculinity. Drawing on an array of relevant narratives and media, it explores the ways that both heterosexual and homosexual soldiers expressed emotion, understood romantic ideals, and approached intimacy and sexuality.

The United States during World War II was unprepared for one of Germany's most destructive war efforts: a U-boat assault on Allied ships in the Caribbean that sank about 400 tankers and merchant ships, with few losses to the German submarine fleet. The Germans had set up a network of spies and had the secret support of some dictators, including the Dominican Republic's Rafael Trujillo, supplying their U-boats with fuel.The Caribbean was of crucial strategic importance to the Allies. Roughly 95 percent of the oil sustaining the East Coast of the United States came from the region, along with bauxite, required to manufacture airplanes. The United States invested billions of dollars to build bases, landing strips, roads, and other military infrastructure on the Puerto Rico and secured a 99-year lease on all the British bases located in the Caribbean. The United States also struck an agreement with neutral Vichy France to keep the French Navy in the harbor of Martinique, preventing it from being turned over to the Germans, in exchange for a food supply for the island. Elsewhere, however, the German blockade was taking a dire human toll. All of the islands experienced a drastic food shortage. The US military buildup created jobs and income, but locals were paid a third as much as continental workers. The military also brought its segregationist policies to the islands, creating further tensions and resentment. The sacrifice of the Caribbean people was bitter, but their participation in the war effort was also decisive: The U-boat menace more or less disappeared from the region in late 1943, thanks to their work building up the US military operation.

In this groundbreaking volume, based on extensive research in Chinese archives and libraries, Jan Kiely explores the pre-Communist origins of the process of systematic thought reform or reformation (ganhua) that evolved into a key component of Mao Zedong's revolutionary restructuring of Chinese society. Focusing on ganhua as it was employed in China's prison system, Kiely's thought-provoking work brings the history of this critical phenomenon to life through the stories of individuals who conceptualized, implemented, and experienced it, and he details how these techniques were subsequently adapted for broader social and political use.

America was made by the railroads. The opening of the Baltimore & Ohio line--the first American railroad--in the 1830s sparked a national revolution in the way that people lived thanks to the speed and convenience of train travel. Promoted by visionaries and built through heroic effort, the American railroad network was bigger in every sense than Europe's, and facilitated everything from long-distance travel to commuting and transporting goods to waging war. It united far-flung parts of the country, boosted economic development, and was the catalyst for America's rise to world-power status.

Every American town, great or small, aspired to be connected to a railroad and by the turn of the century, almost every American lived within easy access of a station. By the early 1900s, the United States was covered in a latticework of more than 200,000 miles of railroad track and a series of magisterial termini, all built and controlled by the biggest corporations in the land. The railroads dominated the American landscape for more than a hundred years but by the middle of the twentieth century, the automobile, the truck, and the airplane had eclipsed the railroads and the nation started to forget them.

In "The Great Railroad Revolution," renowned railroad expert Christian Wolmar tells the extraordinary story of the rise and the fall of the greatest of all American endeavors, and argues that the time has come for America to reclaim and celebrate its often-overlooked rail heritage.

"Holocaust Remembrance Between the National and the Transnational" provides a key study of the remembrance of the Jewish Catastrophe and the Nazi-era past in the world arena. It uses a range of primary documentation from the restitution conferences, speeches and presentations made at the Stockholm International Forum of 2000 (SIF 2000), a global event and an attempt to mark a defining moment in the inter-cultural construction of the political and institutional memory of the Holocaust in the USA, Europe and Israel. Containing oral history interviews with British delegates to the conference and contemporary press reports, this book explores the inter-relationships between global and national Holocaust remembrances.The causes, consequences and 'cosmopolitan' intellectual context for understanding the SIF 2000 are discussed in great detail. Larissa Allwork examines this seminal moment in efforts to globally promote the important, if ever controversial, topics of Holocaust remembrance, worldwide Genocide prevention and the commemoration of the Nazi past. Providing a balanced assessment of the Stockholm Project, this book is an important study for those interested in the remembrance of the Holocaust and the Third Reich, as well as the recent global direction in memory studies.""

Composer and cultural official Nicolas Nabokov (1903-78) led an unusual life even for a composer who was also a high-level diplomat. Nabokov was for nearly three decades an outstanding and far-sighted player in international cultural exchanges during the Cold War, much admired by some of the most distinguished minds of his century for the range of his interests and the breadth of his vision. Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music follows Nabokov's life through its fascinating details: a privileged Russian childhood before the Revolution; exile, first to Germany, then to France; the beginnings of a promising musical career, launched under the aegis of Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes with Ode in 1928; his twelve-year "American exile" during which he occupied several academic positions; his return to Europe after the war to participate in the denazification of Germany; his involvement in anti-Stalinist causes in the first years of the Cold War; his participation in the Congress for Cultural Freedom; his role as cultural adviser to the Mayor of Berlin and director of the Berlin Festival in the early 1960s; the resumption of his American academic and musical career in the late 1960s and 1970s. Nabokov is unique not only in that he was involved on a high level in international cultural politics, but also in that his life intersected at all times with a vast array of people within, and also well beyond, the confines of classical music. Drawing on a vast array of primary sources, Vincent Giroud's first-ever biography of Nabokov will be of interest readers interested in twentieth-century music, Russian music, Russian emigration, and the Cold War, particularly in its cultural aspects. Musicians and musicologists interested in Nabokov as a composer, or in twentieth century Russian composers in general, will find in the book information not available anywhere else.

Most observers who follow nuclear history agree on one major aspect regarding Israel's famous policy of nuclear ambiguity; mainly that it is an exception. More specifically, it is largely accepted that the 1969 Nixon-Meir understanding, which formally established Israel's policy of nuclear ambiguity and transformed it from an undeclared Israeli strategy into a long-lasting undisclosed bilateral agreement, was in fact a singularity, aimed at allowing Washington to turn a blind eye to the existence of an Israeli arsenal. According to conventional wisdom, this nuclear bargain was a foreign policy exception on behalf of Washington, an exception which reflected a relationship growing closer and warmer between the superpower leading the free world and its small Cold War associate. Contrary to the orthodox narrative, this research demonstrates that this was not the case. The 1969 bargain was not, in fact, an exception, but rather the first of three Cold War era deals on nuclear tests brokered by Washington with its Cold War associates, the other two being Pakistan and South Africa. These two deals are not well known and until now were discussed and explored in the literature in a very limited fashion. Bargaining on Nuclear Tests places the role of nuclear tests by American associates, as well as Washington's attempts to prevent and delay them, at the heart of a new nuclear history narrative.

The war for colonial Africa
This very substantial book, written by the two South African official correspondents on the campaign, narrates the expedition in 1914-15 which led to the conquest of German South-West Africa (the region now known as Namibia). One author accompanied the Northern Army and the other, the Southern Army. During the 19th century the great powers of Europe raced to establish themselves in all corners of the globe for colonisation, trade and political influence. In the 'great scramble for Africa, ' the British and German empires had established themselves, by degrees, in the east and west of the continent. In the years before the outbreak of the First World War these colonies existed, more or less, in harmony but once hostilities erupted German and British settlers found themselves living in very close proximity to hostile forces. The British had the advantage of numbers since colonisation had long been a policy, though the Germans compensated for this measure with the abilities of their military commanders and the expertise and quality of their European and locally raised troops. (South Africa itself entered the fray, its forces led by commanders who a little over a decade earlier had led the Boer burghers in their attempts to form a nation independent of the British Empire.) This campaign of mobility was fought in the searing heat of a desert region and was often a 'tip and run affair' as mounted troops traversed huge tracts of inhospitable terrain. Those interested in the First World War often find it's 'side-show' theatres fascinating because they differed so completely from the war of stalemate and attrition on the Western Front. This is a very thorough and comprehensive book written by competent authors who experienced the campaign at first hand and were well qualified to record both their personal impressions and an informed overview of the events they witnessed. This edition of the text is liberally enhanced by the inclusion of many photographs taken on the campaign.
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.

Evolution and Power: China's Struggle, Survival, and Success, edited by Xiaobing Li and Xiansheng Tian, brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to provide a comprehensive look at China s rapid socio-economic transformation and the dramatic changes in its political institution and culture. Investigating subjects such as party history, leadership style, personality, political movements, civil-military relations, intersection of politics and law, and democratization, this volume situates current legitimacy and constitutional debates in the context of both the country s ideology, traditions, and the wider global community. The contributors to this volume clarify key Chinese conceptual frameworks to explain previous subjects that have been confusing or neglected, offering case studies and policy analyses connected with power struggles and political crises in China. A general pattern is introduced and developed to illuminate contemporary problems with government accountability, public opposition, and political transparency. Evolution and Power provides essential scholarship on China s political development and growth.

This book presents absorbing and critical expert perspectives on the post-truth phenomenon that has infiltrated the U.S. political system, media, and populace. Deception in politics is nothing new, but the quantity of unsubstantiated statements in America today is unprecedented. False notions, fake news, "alternative facts," and opinions are being pitched from sources including the White House, Congress, and the American population via Twitter, Facebook, and online news sites as well as print, television, and radio. Such a widespread spectacle instantly captures the attention of people nationwide, but disagreement has the nation almost bordering on civil war over the definition of "the truth" and what this book calls "post-truth." In this text, C.G. Prado and expert contributors present varied perspectives on post-truth, its authoritarian implications for the nation, and how we can approach information to differentiate between truth and post-truth. Speaking to general readers, students, and scholars alike, chapters include text on the historical and social events that initiated and developed post-truth and why some people are more prone than others to accept and perpetuate post-truth. They also discuss post-truth as a threat to democracy. Analyzes Trump-administration-generated mistruths in a discussion of post-truth America Presents varied concerns, perspectives, and thought-provoking topics in clear, accessible, and engaging words Explains the historical and social circumstances that led to post-truth Details why some people are more apt to embrace and spread post-truth Outlines actions to defeat post-truth

The Communist Temptation: Rolland, Gide, Malraux, and Their Times traces the evolution of the committed left-wing public intellectual in the interwar period, specifically in the 1930s, and focuses on leading left-wing intellectuals, such as Romain Rolland, Andre Gide, and Andre Malraux, and their relationships with communism and the broader anti-fascist movement. In that turbulent decade, Paris also welcomed a growing number of Russian, Austrian, Italian, Dutch, Belgian, German, and German-speaking Central European refugees-activists, writers, and agents, among them Willi Munzenberg, Mikhail Koltsov, Eugen Fried, Ilya Ehrenburg, Manes Sperber, and Arthur Koestler-and Paris once again became a hotbed of international political activism. Events, however, signaled a decline in the high ethical standards set by Emile Zola and the Dreyfusards earlier in the twentieth century, as many pro-communist intellectuals acted in bad faith to support an ideology that they in all likelihood knew to be morally bankrupt. Among them, only Gide rebelled against Moscow, which caused ideological lines to harden to the point where there was little room for critical reason to assert itself.