This extraordinary book tells the story of a remarkable family caught in Japan at the outbreak of the Second World War in the Pacific. With letters, journal extracts and notes from Hamish Brown's parents, as well as his own recollections, it brings the era to life: not only life in the dying days of the British Empire, but also the terrible reality of the invasion of Singapore into which they escaped.

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.

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.

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.

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 State of the Political challenges traditional interpretations of the political thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Franz Neumann. Focusing on their adaptation of a German tradition of state-legal theory, the book offers a scholarly, contextualized account of the interrelationship between their political thought and practical political criticism. Dr Kelly criticizes the typical separation of these writers, and offers a substantial reinterpretation of modern German political thought in a period of profound transition, in particular the relationship between political theory and conceptual change. Alongside its focus on German political and juridical thought, the book contributes significantly to the history of European ideas, discussing parliamentarism and democracy, academic freedom and cultural criticism, political economy, patriotism, sovereignty and rationality, and the inter-relationships between law, the constitution and political representation.

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.

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.

From the late eighteenth century, Germans increasingly identified the fate of their nation with that of their woodlands. A variety of groups soon mobilized the 'German forest' as a national symbol, though often in ways that suited their own social, economic, and political interests. The German Forest is the first book-length history of the development and contestation of the concept of 'German' woodlands.

Jeffrey K. Wilson challenges the dominant interpretation that German connections to nature were based in agrarian romanticism rather than efforts at modernization. He explores a variety of conflicts over the symbol -- from demands on landowners for public access to woodlands, to state attempts to integrate ethnic Slavs into German culture through forestry, and radical nationalist visions of woodlands as a model for the German 'race'. Through impressive primary and archival research, Wilson demonstrates that in addition to uniting Germans, the forest as a national symbol could also serve as a vehicle for protest and strife.